Neubauer The Exile and Return of Writers From East-Central Europe

The Exile and Return of Writers from East-Central Europe
The Exile and Return

of Writers from
East-Central Europe
A Compendium
Edited by
John Neubauer and Borbla Zsuzsanna Trk
Walter de Gruyter Berlin New York
IV
Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines
of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the Library
of Congress.
ISBN 978-3-11-021773-5
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.
Copyright 2009 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, 10785 Berlin
All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this
book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.
Printed in Germany
Typesetting: Drlemann Satz GmbH & Co. KG, Lemfrde
Printing and binding: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Gttingen
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
XI
Chapter I
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1. Who is an Exile? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2. Exile and Writing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
3. The Home Cultures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
4. The Dialectics of Exile and Homecoming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The Nineteenth-Century Exile Traditions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Exodus from Hungary in 1919 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Fleeing the Nazis: 193839 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Escaping and Homecoming in 194445 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Racing against the Dropping Iron Curtain: 194750 . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1956 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1968 and Beyond . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Homecoming and New Forms of Exile after 1989 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
5. Sites of Exile Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Istanbul . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Vienna . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Berlin: Intermezzo in the 1920s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Moscow: Exile under Stalin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Paris: its Exile Cultures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
London . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Munich . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Other European Cities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
New York and Academia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Toronto . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Buenos Aires . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Palestine/Israel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
4
4
11
13
19
20
24
27
31
38
38
40
43
44
46
47
55
58
72
81
83
84
86
91
94
96
VI
Table of Contents
Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad:

Publishing Ventures, Exiles Associations, and Audiences
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
In the Vacuum of Exile: The Hungarian Activists in
Vienna 19191926 (va Forgcs) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
Cosmopolitans without a Polis:
Towards a Hermeneutics of the East-East Exilic
Experience (19291945) (Galin Tihanov) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1. Cosmopolitans without a Polis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2. A Brief Case Study: Young Hegel and Lukcss Options
in the 1930s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
3. Homecoming: The Boomerang Doesnt Always Return . . . . . . . . . . . .
133
136
Kultura (19462000) (Wodzimierz Bolecki) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1. Genesis and Beginnings of Kultura . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The Beginnings of Kultura (Italy) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Genesis: The Historical Tradition of Kultura . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Kultura in France . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2. The Editorial Staff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Jerzy Giedroycs Profile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
3. Kulturas Program . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The First Assessment: The 1940s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Kulturas Relation to the Emigration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Kulturas Relation to the Peoples Republic of Poland . . . . . . . . . . . . .
4. The So-called Kultura Line . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
194755 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1956 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
19651980 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
19801989: Solidarity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Kulturas Main Ideas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
5. Kultura: Writers and Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
6. Kulturas Achievements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
144
144
145
146
147
148
148
149
151
151
152
154
155
156
160
161
164
166
168
177
123
123
125
Table of Contents
VII
Polish World War II Veteran migr Writers in the US:

Danuta Mostwin and Others (Bogusaw Wrblewski) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1. The migr Veteran Generation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2. The East-Coast Novelists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
3. Chicago and California Poets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
4. The Third Value . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
189
189
193
195
197
Irodalmi jsg in Exile: 19571989 (John Neubauer) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1. History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2. Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
3. Orientation: Politics and Readership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
4. Contacts with Literary Life in Hungary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
5. Modern World Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
6. The East-Central European Literatures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
7. Cultural Trends in Western Societies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
204
204
210
213
216
219
222
225
The Hungarian Mikes Kr and Magyar Muhely:

Personal Recollections (ron Kibdi Varga) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230
1. Refugee Groups and their Cultural Life, 19451956 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230
2. The Hollandiai Mikes Kelemen Kr (1951) and
the Magyar Muhely (1962) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233
We did not want an migr journal:
Pavel Tigrid and Svedectv (Neil Stewart) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1. Biography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2. Pavel Tigrid: the Writer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
3. Exile and Gradualism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
4. Svedectv : Poetics, Composition, and Historical Development . . . . . .
5. Svedectv : Finances and Logistics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
6. The Empire Writes Back . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
242
244
247
248
252
264
268
Monica Lovinescu at Radio Free Europe (Camelia Cra ciun) . . . . . . . .

1. Personal Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2. Media Position and Political Discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
3. Networking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
4. Lovinescu and the Network in Action: the Tudoran Case . . . . . . . . .
5. Concluding Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
276
278
281
291
296
299
VIII
Table of Contents
Chapter III: Individual Trajectories

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307
Milos Crnjanski in Exile (Guido Snel) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1. Exercises in Homelessness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2. A Novel about London . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
3. Once more on Cooden Beach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
4. Post Scriptum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
309
312
316
321
322
Gombrowicz, the migr (Jerzy Jarze bski) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325

Paul Goma: the Permanence of Dissidence and Exile
(Marcel-Cornis-Pope) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 342
Writing and Internal Exile in Eastern Europe:
The Example of Imre Kertsz (Susan Rubin Suleiman) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1. Shapes of Exile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2. Auschwitz and the Kdr Regime: Kertsz on Internal Exile . . . . . .
3. After Communism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
368
370
374
379
Kunderas Paradise Lost: Paradigm of the Circle

(Vladimr Papous ek) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 384
Chapter IV: Autobiographical Exile Writing

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 397
Life in Translation: Exile in the Autobiographical Works of
Kazimierz Brandys and Andrzej Bobkowski (Katarzyna Jerzak) . . . . 400
1. Life in Translation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 404
2. Uninvited Comparisons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 409
From Diary to Novel: Sndor Mrais San Gennaro vre and
tlet Canudosban (John Neubauer) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 416
San Gennaro vre (Saint Gennaros Blood) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 418
tlet Canudosban ( Judgment in Canudos) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 418
Table of Contents
IX
Exile Diaries: Sndor Mrai, Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski,

and Others (Wodzimierz Bolecki) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 422
Eight Issues of Comparison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 424
Is There a Place Like Home? Jewish Narratives of
Exile and Homecoming in Late Twentieth-Century
East-Central Europe (Ksenia Polouektova) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 432
Chapter V: The 1990s:

Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 473
Herta Mller: Between Myths of Belonging (Thomas Cooper) . . . . . . . . 475
Post-Yugoslav Theater Exile: Transitory, Partial and
Digital (Dragan Klaic) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1. Historic Antecedents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2. Pre-exilic Theater Life in former Yugoslavia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
3. Squandered Opportunities: the Roma Theater Pralipe . . . . . . . . . . . . .
4. From Exile to Integration: Thtre Tattoo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
5. Between Music and the Stage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
6. Career Shifts and Turns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
7. Double Track . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
8. Excursions, not Returns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
9. In the Internet Exile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
10. Exiles as Mediators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
11. Reconstruction and Normalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
12. The Fading of Exile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Losing Touch, Keeping in Touch, Out of Touch:
The Reintegration of Hungarian Literary Exile
after 1989 (Sndor Hites) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1. Closely Watched Connections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2. Encounter of an Ambivalent Kind:
Inside and Outside in the 1990s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
3. Redefining Exile, Redefining the Canon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
497
498
499
501
503
505
506
508
509
512
513
516
517
521
523
528
533
Table of Contents
Albert Wass: Rebirth and Apotheosis of a TransylvanianHungarian Writer (John Neubauer) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1. Immigration, and Literary Debut in the US: 195152 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2. Transylvanian Decline and Resistance: 193440 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
3. Against the Intruders: 19401945 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
4. Perspectives from Exile in Europe: 19451951 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
5. Fiction, Academia, Publishing: Florida 195798 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
6. Legacy, Resurrection, and Apotheosis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
538
538
546
549
556
561
568
Chapter VI
Instead of Conclusion: East Central Literary Exile
and its Representation (Borbla Zsuzsanna Trk) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Arrows into the Playfield . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Transnational Perspectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Times and Themes of Literary Exile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Grundbegriffe und Autoren ostmitteleuropischer
Exilliteraturen 19451989 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
579
579
584
586
591
A Timeline of Exile Movements, 19192000 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 597

List of Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 605
Index of East-Central European Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 613
Preface
XI
Preface
The present volume has been prepared with a generous grant from the Fritz
Thyssen Foundation in Germany, which financed in 2007 research fellowships at the Collegium Budapest for most contributors of this volume. The
editors wish to express their deep gratitute to both the Foundation and the
Collegium for helping us making the book possible.
Our project started with an exciting workshop on September 1113, 2006
at the Collegium in Budapest, titled Between Home and Host Cultures:
Twentieth-Century East European Writers in Exile, which was accompanied
by a series of literary readings and discussions for the public at large. The purpose of this workshop was to establish the basic ideas of the planned research.
We wish to thank Fred Girod, Secretary of the Institute at that time, who was
the motor behind the project in its early phases, as well as all those participants of the workshop who helped launching the project but were for various
reasons unable to participate in its later phases. They include Eva Hoffman,
Seth Wolitz, and Mihly Szegedy-Maszk. Pasts, Inc., Center for Historical
Studies at the Central European University in Budapest was the earliest laboratory to test hypotheses that Sorin Antohi, its first director, has put forward.
The conveners of the workshop and organizers of the project envisioned at
the very outset a coherent set of studies instead of a mere collection of essays.
The contributions were coordinated and placed into a broad social and historical view of exile in the home and the host countries. Several of our
original hypotheses and generalizations rapidly became questionable as we
came to face a profusion of empirical data. We anticipated, of course, great
differences between the experiences of those who fled the Nazis and the
communist dictatorships. However, we have also discovered deep differences
between national traditions of exile, traditions that kept on shifting, mostly in
an asynchronous manner. Furthermore, it became gradually clear that we
would have to devote considerable attention to what Galin Tihanov calls the
East-East Exilic Experience, namely the exiles fleeing to Moscow rather
than Paris or London, and, equally important, that many exiles who fled a
suppression were at one point themselves suppressors. For these and a host of
other reasons we tried to avoid idealizing exiles as stereotypical heroes, and
XII
Preface
attempted to include a broad scene that included personal and ideological

conflicts between those in exile, between exiled writers and their home countries, and between exiles and their new environment.
Given these premises, we have focused mostly on the personal and social
experiences of exile, which find complicated records in diaries, letters, and
memoirs, next to oblique reflections in fiction. After extended discussions,
we agreed to read the formal and linguistic aspects of writing as indices of
psychological, social, and historical states of mind.
We should mention here two other aspects of the projects evolution. The
first is indicated by our very title, in which, at a rather late stage of the project,
we have included homecoming. Though not all contributions deal with it,
the topic has gradually become a second focal point: we felt the need to consider the problems of returning writers after World War II (both from Moscow and from the West), and, even more, to consider the repatriation of
exile writers and their works, which has been an ongoing problem ever since
1989. The second aspect is one of terminology. Although we were from the
very outset aware that exile was a historically and ideologically loaded term,
we realized only gradually how complicated it is to distinguish between exile
in our strict sense of the word and various forms of modern alienation, for
which exile is a frequent metaphor. We became particularly sensitive to the
discursive fact that the exilic phenomena we discuss are unique as well as symbols of modern existential situations. We want to keep alive the latter quasiuniversal significance, but we wish also to resist an abuse of the term,
as, we think, one should resist calling all modern systematic killings a Holocaust.
We would like to take this opportunity to express our gratitude, next to the
Fritz Thyssen Foundation and the Collegium Budapest, to a number of
people who helped us along. Gbor Klaniczay, the Permanent Humanities
Fellow at the Collegium was an important mediator between the project and
the Collegium; va Gnczi, the new Secretary took a very kind interest in our
project and was always an excellent discussion partner; Imre Kondor, the Collegiums former Rector, often played the devils advocate and stimulated us
thereby. Rita Pva did enthusiastic research for us and Diana Kuprel prepared
an excellent translation of Wodzimierz Boleckis article on Kultura. Lszl
Boka, Research Director at the Hungarian National Library repeatedly helped
us both within and outside his library. Ted Anton (Chicago) kindly provided
us material on the Culianu affair, and Mria Korsz at the Somogyi Library
made available for us a crucial document on Albert Wass.
Last but not least, the editors would like to thank the contributors to this
volume. They all showed great enthusiasm for the project and patiently
Preface
XIII
responded to the avalanche of questions and suggestions concerning both

their own work and those of the others. We are proud of having their innovative, informative, and well-written contributions.
XIV
Preface
Chapter I
Introduction
The following essay explores the concept of exile, delineates the specific features of literary exile from twentieth-century East-Central Europe, and offers
an outline of its historical, geographical, and institutional dimensions. It provides a general map for the specialized essays that follow it.
Though conceived and written by John Neubauer, the text owes much to
the other contributors. Some participated in weekly discussions at the Collegium during the fellowship year, with others I have been engaged in e-mail exchanges. Their help was crucial in overcoming my own linguistic and cultural
limitations, which will remain, of course, solely responsible for my errors and
misinterpretations.
A few persons I would especially like to thank. Borbla Zsuzsanna Trk,
co-editor of this volume, contributed in many fruitful discussions more than I
can list here; in particular, I wish to single out her contribution to the section
on internal exile. Wodzimierz Bolecki kindly allowed me to include his text
on the complex figure of Jzef Mackiewicz. Marcel Cornis-Pope contributed
important passages and ideas on Mircea Eliade, Romania, and East-Central
Europe. Darko Suvins eloquent reflections on exile gave my article, and the
whole project, important impulses, especially concerning terminology and
theoretical reflection.
Chapter I
Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century

John Neubauer
1. Who is an Exile?
Im not an emigrant, she says almost gaily, Im an exile. []
Whats the difference? Elementary [] I cant go back home.
Emigrant girls can (Skvorecky, The Engineer of Human Souls 187)
Dieu est n en exil (God Was Born in Exile) claimed a book published in 1960,
though the subtitle clarified that this was a fictional diary of Ovid. The title
was meant seriously, however, because the diaries record not just Ovids
yearning to return to Rome, but also his gradual alienation from his metropolitan home, which he now comes to see as a decadent, dictatorial, and irreligious society, doomed to decline and fall. The fictional Ovid gradually opens
himself towards the culture of his Getae hosts, above all through his servant
Dokia, who does not become his concubine because, as Ovid learns towards
the end of the story, her secret lover is the garrisons Roman commander,
from whom she has a child. With the help of Dokias friends and relatives,
Ovid takes an extensive trip in the region south of the Danube delta and he
gets to know there peaceful, industrious, and humane barbarians who regard Zalmoxis, a legendary social and religious reformer, as their only true
god. For the Getae, death means the return of the immortal soul to Zalmoxis.
Discarding gradually the Greco-Roman deities, the fictional Ovid slowly converts to a god born to him in exile, a curious blend of Zalmoxis and a new
Messiah-child from Bethlehem, about whom he receives an eyewitness report. The double figure of Zalmoxis/Jesus rises on two margins of the Roman
Empire, as it were in exile, and Ovid foresees that a monotheistic god will ultimately topple Romes rule and religion, which are now in the hands of Augustus, an emperor who had declared himself divine. In a both personal and
cultural sense, the novel implies that a morally good life is impossible under a
dictator; only exile can offer hope for a renewal. Ovids own hope is tempered
by his awareness that his decline will prevent him from seeing the new world.
Much of the books attraction lies in its poignant psychological portrayal of
Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)
hope and resignation in Ovid. What role, if any, his personal and literary eroticism may have in the coming new world, is left open. Towards the end of the
book, Dokia marries her Roman commandant and, imaging the biblical flight
to Egypt, they flee with their daughter to the Dacian/Getae country north of
the Danube.
In this case, as in so many other works written in exile, the novel of the
novels history is as interesting and relevant as the book itself. Dieu est n en
exil won the coveted French Prix Goncourt in 1961, but Vintila Horia, a Romanian exile writer then living in Madrid, was finally forced to decline the
honor when it became known that in Romania he had been sentenced in absentia to a life term in prison because of his war-time political engagement.
Knowing this, we recognize in Ovids admiration for the superior DacoRoman tradition a tempered reflection of Horias former right-wing ideology:
modern Romania embodies Ovids hope for a Christian/pagan belief in
Zalmoxis/Jesus and a new world beyond Rome.
Should Horias past have mattered in selecting his book for the award?
Were the members of the jury simply nave or neglectful in carrying out a security check? Were those who attacked Horia and the jury, led by the French
communist daily lHumanit and joined by Jean-Paul Sartre, perhaps blind to
the fact that communist court condemnations were show trials?
These and other questions were raised in a thoughtful article of the Neue
Zrcher Zeitung on April 2, 2007 by the novelist and essayist Richard Wagner,
himself a Banat-Swabian exile from Romania, who was allowed to leave Causescus empire in the 1980s, together with other members of the Aktionsgruppe
Banat. The article was occasioned by a petition that Horia be rehabilitated,
submitted by a number of respected Romanian writers and intellectuals, both
in the country and abroad, among them Ana Blandiana, Paul Goma, and
Monica Lovinescu.
The Horia case, as well as the comparable one of the Hungarian-Transylvanian writer Albert Wass (see the article on him below), indicates that studying exiled twentieth-century writers is no mere exercise in historical scholarship, for the often unfathomable and unimaginable past of East-Central
Europe continues to cast a shadow on its present culture, politics, and cultural
politics. Though few writers go into exile today, the past of the exiles and the
regions exilic past are haunting revenants, old repressions that surface under
new conditions. We hope to shed some light on exile as well as on the region
by taking a historical approach to the phenomenon.
As a fundamental human experience, exile is inscribed into the Bibles banishment from Paradise, as well as into untold other religious and secular
myths. In the history of Europe, people have been repeatedly forced to leave
Chapter I
their home due to religious persecution, ethnic and minority suppression, capricious rulers, petty local politics, and many other acts of violence. Next to
forced displacements of whole groups, many forms of individual ejections
existed, from the Greek practice of ostracism (a temporary banishment by
popular vote without trial or special accusation), through Roman, medieval,
and Renaissance practices of banishment (see Randolph Starn). In Websters
Third and other dictionaries of the English language, exile is defined, therefore, primarily a forced removal from ones native country: expulsion from
home. This expulsion from home need not mean removal to another
country: it also includes internal exile, the forced removal of a person to some
remote part of an empire, as was the case with Ovids banishment to Tomis,
Napoleons to Elba, or Dostoevskys to Siberia. In the twentieth century, various countries sent their people into an internal exile that involved confinement to a certain village but not to a camp.
The twentieth-century forms of exile differ from its earlier manifestations.
In a history of mentalities, we may employ here the term transcendentale Obdachlosigkeit (transcendental homelessness) that the Hungarian philosopher
Gyrgy Lukcs coined in 1916, amidst a war in which most people, including
Lukcss close friend Bla Balzs, enthusiastically offered their blood for their
national and ethnic Heimat. For Lukcs, Obachlosigkeit went well beyond the
war and typified modern existence in general: according to Die Theorie des Romans, homelessness meant banishment from a transcendental home, as well as
from ancient Greece, where, so Lukcs claimed, the transcendental had been
immanent in the social structure. Following the German idealist tradition,
Lukcs believed that in ancient Greece individuals had substantial relations to
their family and state, because these were more general, more philosophical,
closer and more intimately related to the archetypal Heimat (26). However,
following Hegel, Lukcs believed that the security Greece had offered to its
citizens became suffocating later: We can no longer breathe in a closed
world (27). If the epic world of Homer embodied a transcendental Geborgenheit (shelteredness), the modern novel manifested homelessness: The form
of the novel is, like no other one, an expression of transcendental homelessness (35).
While Lukcss theory and historical interpretation are open to criticism, he
was surely right in claiming that a sense of homelessness has permeated the
worldview of many modern European writers and intellectuals, who became
alienated from their native culture, and frequently departed from it all but
voluntarily. Lukcss personal sense of transcendental homelessness led him
a few years later to join the Communist Party, and subsequently to flee from
Hungary. In the Party and its ideology he desperately tried to find an escape
from homelessness. Ideological commitment or its opposite, namely a desire

to free oneself from it, led to the alienation and voluntary exile of many other
twentieth-century artists and intellectuals, including James Joyce, Ezra Pound,
and Samuel Beckett.
We wish to distinguish this transcendental sense of estrangement and
homelessness from the concrete social and political forms of twentieth-century exile and mass dislocation. Pre-modern exile concerned individuals or
small groups of people. Starting with the Renaissance, however, masses of
people came to be expelled, and the term refugee was introduced to designate groups of people who sought to escape persecution by asking for asylum
in another country. Such were the French Huguenots, the French Acadians
expelled by the British from Nova Scotia, and, later, the refugees (or migrs)
fleeing the French Revolution (Zolberg 511). In East-Central Europe, the
dominant form of nineteenth-century displacement became political (rather
than religious) exile; witness the exiles of the Polish uprisings in 1830 and
1863 and those who fled after the defeat of the 184849 Hungarian war of independence.
In the twentieth century, the conditions of European exile have changed
radically, and not only because of its massive numbers. As Aristide Zolberg
writes, one of the hallmarks became the the reinstatement of prohibition against
exit, such as were common in the age of absolutism but now implemented by
states with a much greater ability to control movement across their borders
(16; italics JN). Those who were able to escape found themselves in a new
situation, because, as Hannah Arendt (and more recently Giorgio Agamben)
has argued, nation states now governed human rights. Those who did not
have a nationality reverted to a state of nature.
Expulsion in the traditional sense became relatively rare in the twentieth
century, though it was occasionally exercized in the Soviet Union, the German Democratic Republic, and at times also by virtually all East-Central
European communist regimes. The methods varied from country to country.
Some dissidents, for instance the Hungarian Squat Theater, were simply
ejected; others, like the Czechs Jir Grusa and Pavel Kohout, were denied
reentry after a trip abroad; the Hungarian Gyrgy Konrd was offered, but
refused, the possibility to leave. The Romanians Paul Goma, Dumitru Tepeneag, and Dorin Tudoran were allowed to exit after a protracted fight for a
permit, whereas the Poles Leszek Kolakowski, Zygmunt Bauman, Jan Kott,
and others were forced abroad by means of job deprivation, publication prohibition, and various sorts of harassments.
Still, the mentioned cases were exceptions. Twentieth-century European dictatorships preferred to keep their critics, dissidents, and undesirable
Chapter I
elements at home rather than abroad, for at home they could be silenced,
locked up in jails and forced labor camps, or simply murdered; abroad they
could rally politicians and public opinion against the dictatorial regime. Our
following definition reflects then the key historical fact that within the spatial
and temporal coordinates of our study exiles were usually not ejected; they fled
by their own volition in order to escape totalitarianism, minority suppression, and
racial persecution:
In twentieth-century East-Central Europe exile usually meant a self-motivated or, occasionally, forced departure from the home country or habitual place of residence, because
of a threat to the persons freedom or dignified survival, such as an imminent arrest, sentence, forced labor, or even extermination. The departure was for an unforeseeable time
irreversible.
The criteria of irreversibility and immediate threat to a persons freedom or

dignified survival restrict our definition but include the major groups: the
leftists who fled after the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919 for
fear of a White Terror; the Jews, Czechs, and Poles who fled the imminent
Nazi threat in 193839; participants of the Hungarian 1956 revolution who
had to flee after its defeat; and most of those that left Czechoslovakia after the
suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968.
To this core group of exiles we may add those to whom our central criteria
of immediate threat and no return apply only partially: the migrs and
the expatriates. The latter retain their original nation-state rights and are
spared an indefinite, possibly final, sundering from their native society,
whereas migrs may share in the solitude and estrangement of exile, but
they do not suffer under its rigid proscriptions (Said, Reflections 166). As
Leszek Koakowski put it:
More often than not, modern exiles have been expatriates, rather than exiles in the strict
sense; usually they were not physically deported from their countries or banished by law;
they escaped from political persecution, prison, death, or simply censorship. The distinction is important insofar as it has had a psychological effect. Many voluntary exiles
from tyrannical regimes cannot rid themselves of a feeling of discomfort. [] A certain
ambiguity is therefore unavoidable, and it is impossible to draw up any hard-and-fast
rules to distinguish justifiable from unjustifiable self-exile. (188)
Since it remains unclear in this passage by what criteria a self-exile may be

unjustifiable, it would perhaps be better to speak of a departure that is not
primarily motivated by political pressure. Still, our distinction generally agrees
with that of Koakowski, if we insert between exiles and expatriates the
migrs. Like him, we emphasize that earlier exiles were ejected whereas modern ones usually enter a self-exile. Like him, we ask when political suppression
becomes so unbearable that self-exile remains the only self-defense, and we
believe, like him, that no hard-and-fast rules can be established for this, partly
because we usually have only the evidence given by the exiled person, which is
subjectively experienced and may change with time. We are usually unable to
determine, just how threatening the home conditions were for the person
who left. For all these reasons, it is preferable to separate exiles and migrs
by an imaginary gray band rather than a sharp line.
The socio-political conditions at the time of departure and the original intentions of the departing person are not the only factors that determine the
status of a person. migrs or expatriates may suddenly turn into genuine exiles by making a provocative statement or engaging in a political act that turn
them into an enemy of the regime at home. Eugne Ionesco, for instance, departed as an expatriate but became an exile that could no longer return to
communist Romania when his play Le Rhinocros came to be understood as an
allegory of suppressive states like Romania.
migrs may be dissatisfied with the cultural and political situation at
home, but, in our view, they become exiles only if they are under imminent
threat. If they leave legally and do not burn the bridges behind themselves,
they are, strictly speaking, no exiles. Take, for instance, the Romanian Jewish
writer Benjamin Fundoianu, who, having visited Paris in 1923, definitely left
his country in 1935. His reasons included the growing anti-Semitism in Romania, but also his wish to write in a major language and to contribute to
world literature. In this sense, he was strictly speaking no exile, though he became one when measures were taken against the Jews in Romania. Unfortunately, he was denounced in his presumed safe haven, and perished in the
Holocaust. The eminent Serbian writer Milos Crnjanski (see Guido Snels article on him below) quit the Yugoslav diplomatic service when his country
was invaded by the Germans, and he stayed in London even after the war in a
semi-legal fashion. He finally returned to Yugoslavia as a celebrated writer in
the 1960s. Thus, Crnjanski shifted his status: he did not flee but became an
exile due to the Nazi occupation of his country; after the war, he was an
migr rather than an exile, perhaps even an expatriate. Milan Kundera is also
difficult to classify. Unlike the Hungarian exiles of 1956, he did not flee his
country immediately after the suppression of the 1968 Prague Spring but tried
to make the best of it. His life and freedom were apparently not immediately
endangered, though he was kicked out of the Communist Party in 1970 (after
an earlier ejection and readmission). When he finally concluded in 1975 that
normalized Czechoslovakia was unlivable, he left and did burn the bridges
behind himself by publishing regime-hostile texts abroad.
Expatriates are easier to distinguish from exiles and migrs because they
leave without being existentially endangered; in principle, they can return
10
Chapter I
any time they want to. More often than not as in the case of James Joyce and
Samuel Beckett departing from Ireland, or Gertrud Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and other American artists settling in Paris during the interwar years
their unforced departure is motivated by a general sense of alienation from
the home culture. That Joyce often stylized himself as an exile, and that exile
was both a theme of his fiction and an attribute of his literary alter-egos are
important for understanding the writer and his art, but classifying him as a
genuine (rather than metaphoric) exile would water down the existential
weight of the term as we use it. Similarly, East-Central European writers, artists, actors, and directors went to Paris and Berlin in the 1920s because they
were attracted to the intensity of artistic and intellectual life there. They were
not, strictly speaking, exiles; one of the exceptions was Bruno Jasienski, who
quit Poland in 1925 due to harassments at home, and lived a destitute life in
Paris until he was ejected because of his 1929 novel Je brle Paris (I Burn
Paris).
The terms exile, migr, and expatriate designate individuals or small
groups; they carry a certain elitist connotation, though not in terms of material wealth. Such individual fortunes should be considered against the background of historical mass movements. During the Reformation and the
Counter-Reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, masses of
people fled religious persecution all over Europe, and in East-Central Europe, massive dislocations were caused by the Ottoman wars. As late as 1690,
tens of thousands of Serbs left with the Patriarch Carnojevic III their still beleaguered homes and resettled in various parts of Hungary.
At least three designations refer to masses of displaced individuals in modern East-Central Europe: diasporic people, migrants, and forcefully repatriated people.
The Jews (outside of Israel), the Roma, the Armenians, and other diasporic
people were stateless ethnic groups throughout much of their history. They
have been admitted to various modern states, but always tenuously and with
restrictions. Some members of these diasporic communities acquired ambiguous multiple identities, while others have refused dispersion and either
assimilated or displayed their marginality and otherness consciously and conspicuously. Migrants refer in our context to those masses whom deprivation
drove to migrate from Europe to North America in the nineteenth and early
twentieth century (migrant workers came in large numbers to Western Europe in the post-World-War II decades, but not to the region we are concerned with). While there were relatively few first-generation writers and
artists among these economic immigrants of the New World, their ethnicsocial organizations became of considerable importance to writers who fled
there later.
11
Exiles and migrs become refugees if they ask for asylum abroad. Article 1
of the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (as
amended by the 1967 Protocol) defines a refugee as follows:
[A person who] owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to
avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being
outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable
or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it. (www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/o_
c_ref.htm)
Focusing on a refugees past status in the home country (or habitual residence), the convention defines what a refugee status in a host nation state is.
This highly important question of legality will play a relatively small role in our
volume.
Having sharply distinguished between exiles and migrs, we admitted subsequently that in concrete cases the choice of label is not always easy to make.
To this experiential fuzziness we have to add in conclusion a linguistic/discursive one. In Polish, and to a lesser extent in Hungarian and other languages
of the region, the terms emigrants, emigration, and their variants have
often been used to cover also what we define in this volume as exile: our
rational-transnational distinction occasionally clashes with historical discourse.
In specific contributions to our volume it would have been pedantic as well as
a-historical to insist on using exile instead of emigration. We allowed for
inconsistency in order to accommodate national and historical variety.
2. Exile and Writing

We spoke of exiles, migrs, and expatriates as if all of them had been writers,
though these constitute only a vanishingly small fraction of all those that leave
their home. We did so, because, next to judicial records (which are scarce and
often completely lacking), writers give the most thorough and extensive accounts of exile. As Dubravka Ugresic ironically remarks, writers are those
rare migrants who leave their footprints, though they are statistically the
most insignificant and unreliable witnesses (127). Millions survived or died in
exile silently; writers have offered us not only stories of their lives but also literary works like Dantes Divine Comedy that transcend the immediate events,
personal feelings, and their articulations.
Indeed, some of the most distinguished pre-nineteenth-century European
exiles were writers. Next to the famous cases of Ovid, Cicero, Seneca, Dante,
12
Chapter I
Petrarch, and Machiavelli there were many exiled writers that became key figures within a national tradition. Perhaps the most distinguished eighteenthcentury Hungarian literary work was written by Kelemen Mikes, who followed his political leader, Ferenc Rkczy, into an exile that led him into Poland, France, and finally Turkey. At Terkirdag/Rodost he wrote between
1717 and 1758 some 207 letters to a fictional aunt, which constitute his Trkorszgi levelek (Letters from Turkey), a poignant literary masterwork that could
be published only posthumously, in 1794.
Torn out of their home environment and frequently separated from their
family and friends, exiles settle in alien social and linguistic worlds that often
restrict them to solitary confinement. This is particularly true of East-Central
European writers (as well as actors), because the communities they settle in
do not speak their language. Dante settled in another Italian culture, British
emigrants usually went to other English-speaking parts of the world, East
German writers could settle in West Germany; but East-Central European
exiles apart from ethnic German writers who lived in East-Central Europe
(see Thomas Coopers article below on Herta Mller) had to settle in foreign
linguistic environments, in which, at best, they could occasionally find a minority subculture of their language. Although we intend to go beyond individual writers and their texts, for practical reasons we are unable to offer a systematic and comprehensive treatment of these exile and emigrant subcultures,
which also include other artists, scholars, free-lance intellectuals, as well as various professional people and politicians. In Chapter II we do offer, however,
case studies on literary exile cultures abroad.
Businessmen, doctors, lawyers, engineers, and most academic people can
continue to exercise their professions in exile, for these depend less on language. Painters and musicians can also get along with a rudimentary mastery
of the host language. Writers, however, are not engineers (of the soul, as
Stalin thought) but verbal artists who often have to make traumatic and existential decisions in exile concerning their mtier. If they continue to write in their
mother tongue, their readers will usually be restricted to the exile and migr
community of their language, for their works can reach neither the native
readers they left behind nor the readers of their host country (as was the case
with Sndor Mrai, Witold Gombrowicz, and most other exile writers). If
they adopt the language of their host country, their work becomes available to
a larger, often global, reading public, but the switch often becomes the source
of a life-long sense of inadequacy and inferiority, as in the case of Emil Cioran,
Agota Kristof, and others. A number of writers among them Milan Kundera, Andrei Codrescu, Jerzy Pietrkiewicz, Ota Philip, Libusa Monkov, and
Jir Grusa switched with relative ease to a new language, and a few exile
13
writers from East-Central Europe could turn the exposure to several languages even into a source of artistic creativity.
Having said all this, it remains difficult to demarcate exactly literature from
other types of writing, and to differentiate between professional and occasional writers. Studies of writing in exile must go beyond imaginative literature and include autobiographies, correspondence, and other personal writings that are often produced by journalists, philosophers, essayists, historians,
and other professionals. We have tried to keep our demarcations flexible.
3. The Home Cultures

In contrast to essays and critical reflections, scholarly studies of exile have traditionally focused on a single country and a single linguistic community. This
is justified inasmuch as exile and emigration are induced by national political
and social conditions, but the results, which utilize a limited database, do not
allow for generalizations. In the absence of a comparative international
framework, such studies may not even reveal the full significance of the
national phenomenon, for understanding a specific form of national exile
may require, as in the case of a native language, knowledge of analogous and
alternative possibilities. Hence our choice to study exile on a regional level.
The transnational region we have chosen for our study includes the present
states of Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Croatia, and
Serbia. Including other countries would have raised both serious practical difficulties and additional conceptual problems. The Russian Revolution of 1917
to the East of our region, and Hitlers Germany to the West of it, forced masses
of people into exile (usually termed migrs in the Russian case), but the scale
and the problems of these displacements fundamentally differed from the phenomenon we are studying here. The exiles from the Baltic countries and from
the southern Balkan countries involved smaller groups, but their patterns were
significantly different: in the Baltic countries: the threat and the actual Nazi occupation produced a massive Soviet forced removal eastward, but only a negligible exodus over the borders of the Soviet Union, whereas the reoccupation
by the Soviet Union produced a small but significant exodus, mostly to Sweden,
where only a handful of exiles fled from our region. In the Balkans, history also
ran differently. There were no significant exile groups from Albania and the
southern states of ex-Yugoslavia. Bulgaria represents somewhat of an exception, but we excluded it in order to keep geographic coherence.
There are no fully satisfactory ways of labeling our region. Calling it Central
Europe would have necessitated the inclusion of Austria and Germany,
14
Chapter I
whereas the Cold-War term Eastern Europe is too broad and now outdated. We have therefore adopted and modified for our purposes the term
that has been used in Marcel Cornis-Popes and John Neubauers four-volume
History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe.
What, then, were the social, political, and historical conditions in these
countries that gave rise to the exile of writers in the twentieth century? To take
a step backward, we first note that none of the countries now occupying the
region was fully independent in the nineteenth century. In the process of a
national (re)awakening, each of them went through a struggle against one or
several hegemonic powers that forced many patriotic writers into exile. The
suppressors were in the first instance the powers to the East and West (Russia,
Prussia, and Austria), but we ought to add that nations struggling for independence usually also suppressed their minority populations. This was the
case with Hungary, especially once it became the junior partner of the Dual
Monarchy.
The situation radically changed, and to certain extent reversed itself, when
in the wake of World War I the Dual Monarchy collapsed and Hungary lost
two-thirds of its pre-war territory whereas a number of nation states Poland,
Czechoslovakia, Greater Romania, and the Kingdom of Serbia, Croatia, and
Slovenia (re)emerged. The new national constellation and the redrawing of
borders led to an unprecedented European phenomenon: millions of refugees, as well as persons who were expelled or exchanged in order to create
homogenous national populations:
In 1918 huge masses of refugees appeared in Europe, victims of the new-style nationstates especially those consolidating their precarious existence in the postwar world. It
was estimated in 1926 that there were no less than 9.5 million European refugees, including two million Poles to be repatriated [] 250,000 Hungarians, and one million
Germans expelled from various parts of Europe (Marrus 5152, based on Bryas 56).
World War II created an even greater humanitarian crisis: at the end of the
war, millions of liberated concentration-camp inmates, released prisoners of
war, refugees, and displaced persons from the Eastern parts of Europe were
roaming around or lingering in DP camps. While the Western Allies managed
to repatriate more than five of the seven million displaced persons by September 1945 (often, however, forcing them to go back to the Soviet Union:
see Marrus 31317), the situation worsened in the Eastern part of Europe,
because another redrawing of borders led to the expulsion or voluntary departure of those that became unwanted in their home. Article XIII of the
Potsdam agreement sanctioned, for instance, the transfer of Germans from
Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary to Germany, a country that had just
lost a significant part of its Eastern territory (now stretching only to the Oder-
15
Neisse line) to Poland. It is estimated that Hungary, one of the more liberal
countries in this respect, expelled some 135 000 Germans.
Many of the homes vacated by the expelled Germans came to be occupied
in these countries by refugees that the Soviet Union had displaced by incorporating into the Ukrainian Soviet Republic Polands Eastern Borderlands,
Czechoslovakias Carpatho-Ruthenia and Romanias Bessarabia and Bukovina. Czechoslovakia forcefully exchanged also some of its Hungarians;
Romania did not eject its Transylvania Saxons, Banat Swabians, and Hungarian Szkelys (though many Romanian Germans were taken into Soviet and
Romanian camps for many years), but its minorities dramatically dwindled in
the following decades by voluntary or involuntary exits. Such massive and
painful intra-regional removals gradually homogenized formerly multicultural
areas by moving people from minority habitats to ethnically and/or linguistically home countries.
We shall bypass these mass displacements in this volume, for they represent intra- rather than inter-regional forms of exile and emigration, and they
involved relatively few mature writers. To be sure, many writers were displaced as young adults or as children of migrating families. The parents of
Eva Hoffman moved in 1945 (the year she was born) from the Ukrainian
Lviv (formerly the Polish Lww) to Cracow (Hoffman 8); Aleksander Rymkiewicz and many others moved in 1945 to Poland, when Wilno became Vilnius, capital of the Lithuanian Soviet Republic; Wodzimierz Odojewski,
born in Poznan but raised in the Polish/Ukrainian borderland, also moved to
Poland; Paul Celan, Norman Manea, and other Romanians moved from the
now Ukraine Bukovina to Romanian cities; Romanian and Hungarian writers
moved back and forth according to the fortunes of Northern Transylvania,
which went from Romania to Hungary (as the consequence of a Hitler-supported decision in Vienna) in 1940 and was returned to Romania after the
war. The Romanian poet Lucian Blaga, who held a special university chair in
Cluj, fled when the Hungarian troops marched in; he returned to Cluj in
1945 but was deprived of his chair by the communists in 1948. We shall bypass also those Romanian German writers (most prominent among them
Heinrich Zillich), who voluntarily went home to Nazi Germany in the
1930s, but Thomas Cooper will discuss below Herta Mller, a prominent Romanian Swabian writer who was allowed to leave the Banat in the 1980s and
experienced a complicated homecoming in Germany. The Hungarians still
represent a significant minority in Transylvania and the Banat, but writers
continued to transfer to Hungary both during the interwar years (e.g. Lajos
prily and Sndor Makkai) and after 1945 (e.g. Mikls Bnffy and ron Tamsi).
16
Chapter I
Each East-Central European communist regime forced its own pattern of

exile and emigration. Yugoslavia, expelled in 1948 from the Stalins international Cominform, subsequently became a receiver rather than exporter of
exiles (Vladimir Dedijer, a follower of Milovan -Dilas, was an exception). Many
exiles left the other East-Central European countries in the late 1940s to escape the communist takeover and consolidation of power, but this stream
dwindled by 1950, and even the death of Stalin (1953) did not ease immediately the border control. The two windows of opportunity during the
195070 period , after the defeat of 1956 Hungarian uprising and after the
suppression of the 1968 Prague Spring involved a host of prominent writers
and intellectuals. Poland had a different history. A steady stream of Jews left
after the government lifted the ban on Jewish emigration in 1958, and the exodus peaked again during the anti-Semitic wave in the Party (1968), as well as
the declaration of martial law in the early 1980s. The rhythm of exodus was
different again in Romania. Relatively few people left during the Thaw of the
1960s, but the numbers increased in the 1970s and 80s, when Ceausescus regime became increasingly dictatorial. Though Ceausescu made departure extremely difficult for native Romanians, he generously allowed Jews and
Germans to emigrate by exacting substantial ransoms from Germany and
Israel.
We shall fill in this outline with a history of individual writers and intellectuals in the following section. Suffice to conclude here that the exile and emigration policies of the East-European satellite nations was by no means uniform, and, furthermore, that until the later 1970s and 80s the dissident writers
and intellectuals of the various countries had little contact with each other.
As Csaba Kiss remarks, East-Central European writers traditionally knew
little about each other because they looked to Paris from Warsaw and Prague,
Belgrade and Bucharest rather than to the neighboring capitals (126). Exactly
this common attraction to the Western cultural centers (in case of the communists of the 1930s to Moscow) encourages us to treat exile on a regional
basis. Those who remained at home dreamed of a world beyond the regions
western borders, while those who departed shared a romantic Heimweh
coupled with a disdain for the Heimat. National differences determined only
partly which of these feelings dominated. Those who were literally forced to
flee from their homeland tended to suffer more from pain and nostalgia than
the migrs and expatriates who departed usually by their own volition. Sndor Mrai, who was for all practical purposes forced out of Hungary, remained affectionately attached to it all his life, while the Polish Witold Gombrowicz and the Romanian Emil Cioran, who were not coerced to leave, had
adopted sharply critical and ironic views of their country even before they had
17
left it. Witness Ciorans Schimbarea la fata a Romniei (The Transfiguration of

Romania), which he published in 1938, based on views he had held already in
Romania.
Having an audience in the native language is an existential need for most
writers. migrs and expatriates from East-Central Europe could, as a rule,
hold on to their home audience until they became publicly critical of the
political regime. Those who fled, instantaneously lost their opportunity to
publish at home and were forced to consider alternatives: they could try publishing for a native reading public abroad, or they had to learn to write for a
larger public in a new language. Smuggling books into the homeland was all
but impossible during World War II; in the later years of the communist regimes, from the 1960s onward, it became possible in some countries (notably
Poland, partly in Czechoslovakia), though it remained an unstable and unreliable source of income. Samizdat publications of exiled authors also surfaced
in these decades, but they were of artistic and political rather than financial
value.
Those who survived exile and lived to see 1945 or 1989 could consider
reestablishing their personal and professional ties with the homeland, but, as
our articles in Chapter V show, this turned out to be in most cases immensely
more complicated than it had been anticipated. Here we wish to touch merely
on the clashes between returning exiles and those that claimed to have lived in
inner emigration during totalitarian regimes. A brief reflection on the origin
of the term may help us identify some of its complexity.
The term came into use in the 1930s, by both those who fled Hitler and
those who remained at home. In those years, Klaus Mann, Paul Tillich, Thomas Mann, and other exiles acknowledged the existence of an internal resistance to Hitler and felt in solidarity with it (Grimm 4041). This changed during the war and its aftermath. To Thomas Manns great chagrin, several
German writers who had stayed at home started to glorify inner emigration.
As Frank Thiess wrote with a swipe at the exiles: inner emigration consisted
of a community of intellectuals that remained loyal to Germany by not abandoning it and not watching it from a comfortable dress box abroad, but
shared its misfortune with all sincerity (Mann, Die Entstehung 124; see also 119
and 168). Gottfried Benn, a leading poet, even made the outrageous claim
that becoming a Wehrmacht officer was an aristocratic form of emigration
(3: 942 and 8: 1960). As a result, Thomas Mann angrily came to deny that
inner emigration had ever existed.
The Frank Thiess/Thomas Mann controversy continued in the following
decades, when German writers and literary historians came to argue about the
relative values of exilic and home literature. Conservatives tended to over-
18
Chapter I
value the literature written in Germany under Hitler, while exiles and critics
from the left came to regard claims to inner emigration as empty excuses.
At a University of Wisconsin conference on exile an inner emigration Reinhold Grimm gave an excellent historical account of how inner emigration
emerged as a concept, but in his subsequent examination of opposition to
Hitler Grimm confounded inner emigration with dissidence, and once more
obscured its meaning (see Snell 1011).
What implications does this first, specifically German, use of inner emigration have for its use by others elsewhere? Though it was coined to designate a phenomenon in Nazi Germany, we must allow for other meanings in
other contexts, especially since it is not always clear whether the new use of
the term was a nomadic variant of the German one or a new coinage, whose
originator was unaware of the first German meaning. Comparative studies
such as ours should remind us, however, that this usually positively connoted
term had a decidedly negative meaning for German writers, critics, and
scholars returning from exile. Just as many Frenchman claimed after the war
to have participated in the resistance movement, many German writers who
stayed at home constructed a self-image via inner emigration that prettified
their often less than admirable attitude under the Nazi regime.
We should also keep in mind a terminological rather than historical aspect
of inner emigration: Grimms historically useful discussion does not carve
out a conceptual space for it. Dissidence and internal emigration partially
overlap, but they are surely not synonymous. Did, for instance, the Polish poet
Stanisaw Baranczak automatically become, as he claimed, an inner emigrant
rather than a dissident when he was silenced (Kliems, Dissens 209)? Facing
censorship, dissidents try to assume an oppositional public voice and activity,
whereas those in internal exile tend to withdraw from politics and even from
the world. They are silenced, or they voluntarily fall silent, and their writing
goes into the drawer of their desk, not to a (legal, samizdat, or foreign) publisher. Yet writers and scholars continue to confound dissidence and inner
emigration. Ferenc Fejto, for instance, calls Milovan -Dilass prohibition to
publish and frequent jailing a belso [internal] emigrci (536), though -Dilas
did publish his writings abroad, and he was an active dissident rather than a silent voice, even if the authorities tried to silence him. Even more complicated
is the case of the Hungarian writer Imre Kertsz that Susan Suleiman analyzes
in our volume. Kertsz had difficulty publishing during the postwar decades,
and he felt isolated from the Hungarian literary establishment. Hence he
claims that during the decades of Russian occupation he had been in a de
facto in inner emigration (Das eigene Land 111). He did not completely
fall silent, nor was he completely ignored, but for a long time he did not
19
receive the recognition he should have. Still, as Suleiman rightly argues, he was
no dissident, and part of his isolation resulted precisely from his reluctance to
join dissidents like Gyrgy Konrd or Istvn Ersi.
In other contexts, internal exile has been used to refer to people who
were banished to a remote part of the same country (Siberia, Kazakhstan, or,
as in Adrian Marinos case, to Romanias Baragan region). More recently, it has
also been applied to people who fled from one member state of the former
Yugoslav Federation to the other.
4. The Dialectics of Exile and Homecoming

Dividing history into centuries is a convenient way to chop up time, but actual
historical events seldom fit into prefixed calendar units. Is it justified then
to single out twentieth-century exile, as we do in our volume? For practical
purposes, twentieth-century exile actually begins only after World War I, and
we shall therefore pass over in silence all but a fifth of it, limiting thus our
treatment to what is sometimes called the short century. We do believe
that the exilic experiences of the following eighty years (19202000) were
radically different from those of earlier centuries, in terms of both scale and
violence. The suffering of exiles in the nineteenth century pales in comparison to the pain of those that barely escaped the Holocaust and communist
persecution.
Could we not, however, distinguish within the twentieth century itself radically different exilic experiences? More than one answer is possible. We have
chosen the twentieth century as our basic unit because we believe that, for all
their differences, the Nazis and the communists have produced interrelated
exilic forms and experiences. The two ought to be seen in light of each other,
not because they were identical or even similar, but because understanding one
necessitates the context of the other. The otherwise excellent encyclopedic
study Grundbegriffe und Autoren ostmitteleuropischer Exilliteraturen 19451989
(Basic Concepts and Authors of the East-Central European Exile Literatures,
19451989) by Eva Behring and her associates misses the opportunity of such
a mutual illumination by focusing exclusively on the postwar exiles that fled
from the communist regimes. Yet, those fleeing Stalins totalitarianism often
had to settle in communities with exile and migr social networks that were
built by both those that had fled the Nazis and those that had supported them.
The shared bitter experience of exile could not erase the difference in the
worldviews and ideologies of these two groups. To put it perhaps all too
sharply, those who fled the Nazis were mostly Jews and/or people with left-
20
Chapter I
wing political convictions, whereas most of those that fled after the war were
either militant anti-communists, or reform communists who fled Hungary
after 1956 or Czechoslovakia after 1968, deeply disillusioned by the betrayal of
their ideals in political practice.
Precisely the differences between the conditions of exiles fleeing the Nazi
and the communist regimes warrant their joint study. The relationship between the first (Nazi) and the second (communist) waves of exile does not
simply follow the arrow of time, revealing how the later phenomenon had
been conditioned by the former. On a more theoretical level, in meta-reflections that attempt to systematize thinking about exile, we must draw on both
experiences, as well as on the more recent European and global cases of exile,
displaced persons, refugees, and asylum seekers. Modern theorizing on exile
began with the work of Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno and other exiles
fleeing the Nazis. Some contemporary authors, for instance the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, take Arendts ideas as their point of departure;
others, for instance the Palestine-American Edward Said and authors interested in post-colonialism, choose to start with reflections on forced displacements outside Europe. Given our subject, the social and historical dimensions of the (East-Central) European experience and its theoretical
implications, the approach of Arendt and the other pre-war exiles is of
special importance to us. Yet we must reconsider their Nazi/Jewish based reflections, in light of the exilic experiences brought about by Communism,
and the new technological modes of communication. In short, if fleeing the
Nazis was a historical antecedent of exile from the communist regimes, the
latter, in turn, should lead to a retrospective rethinking of what Arendt,
Adorno, and other Nazi exiles wrote. Studies of concrete exile phenomena
may follow the arrow of historical time, but theoretical reflections should
point in the opposite direction today.
The Nineteenth-Century Exile Traditions

General opinion holds that exiles and migrs have traditionally gravitated towards Paris. Indeed, this was the city where many nineteenth-century EastCentral European exiles, migrs, and expatriates settled, but their composition fluctuated and was never evenly distributed among the various nations.
Note, for instance, that East-Central European exiles fleeing Russian repression flooded Paris in the nineteenth century, whereas after 1919 the city became inundated by migr Russians fleeing the Bolsheviks. In what follows,
we wish to show that Paris was a second, and sometimes even primary, home
21
for Polish and Romanian writers, but this does not hold for Hungarian,
Czech, Slovak, and South-Slavic writers.
After Polands second partitioning in 1795, Paris became the Polish political and cultural capital, and the city kept this role during the first half of the
nineteenth century. Poland and France, both Catholic countries, had maintained close political and cultural ties for centuries. These ties became particularly close under Napoleon, whom most Poles supported in the hope
that he would free the country from Russian oppression. As Czesaw Miosz
writes, the most important single phenomenon of Polish Romanticism was,
perhaps, the Napoleonic legend, releasing as it did new forces of feeling
and imagination (History 207). Indeed, common anti-Russian sentiments
fuelled French-Polish ties throughout the nineteenth century. In 1831, after
the collapse of the November Insurrection against Russian domination, several thousand Polish officers, soldiers, and intellectuals immigrated to
France. In 1843, Prince Adam Czartoryski set up the conservative Monarchist Society of May 3 in the Parisian Hotel Lambert, which came to function as an informal government in exile. For several decades, Paris, rather
than Warsaw or Cracow, was the center of Polish culture, and the national
romantic tradition that emerged here was so powerful that Polish writers felt
compelled to follow, oppose, or, as in the case of Witold Gombrowicz, to
ridicule it ever since. Miosz recalls in Tak zreszta spelnila that reading at
the lyceum the grand prophetic texts of the Polish romantic exiles he came
to believe (we should say prophetically) that he could achieve poetic greatness only if he too went into exile (Poezje 3: 79).
However, the relationship of the major Polish romantic writers to Paris was
not always simple. Adam Mickiewicz, the most important of them, was invited in 1840 to assume the first chair of Slavic language and literature at the
Collge de France, but his initially very popular lectures came to an unforeseen early end in 1844, partly because the poet came under the influence of
the Polish mystic Andrzej Towianski, but mainly because his distrust of the
Church and the admiration he expressed for Napoleon in his later lectures
embarrassed the French authorities. Juliusz Sowacki fled to France after the
183031 insurrection, but he was prevented next year from reentering because the French authorities considered his first collection of poems too patriotic. Nevertheless, he managed to live in Paris until his death in 1849. Cyprian Kamil Norwid, another leading Polish romantic poet, was expelled
from Prussia in 1846 and lived much of his nomadic exile (184952 and
185483) in Paris, though mostly in poor health and in depravation. Zygmunt
Krasinski, finally, also lived much of his emigrant life in Paris, against the
wishes of his father, a pro-Russian general.
22
Chapter I
Polish literature was also present in nineteenth-century Paris through cultural institutions, two of which still function. The Socit littraire polonaise (after
1854 Socit historique et littraire polonaise), was founded in 1832 by Prince Adam
Czartoryski, who also became its first President. Founded to combat Polands
Russification and Germanization, the Socit counted among its members not
only such Polish cultural emblems as Chopin, Mickiewicz, and Jzef Bem, but
also distinguished French writers and historians like George Sand, Jules
Michelet, Prosper Mrime, and Alfred de Vigny. The Socit initiated the Bibliothque Polonaise with a call by Mickiewicz. Established in 1838, it grew in the
following decades through major donations of books, manuscripts, art objects, and a variety of archival materials. In 1893, it became a subsidiary of the
Cracow (later Polish) Academy of the Sciences and Letters. In the last decades
of the nineteenth century there were actually more than sixty active ParisianPolish associations, clubs, and societies, among them Le Cercle Polonaise Artistique-Littraire, an association of Polish artists in Paris. The primary aim of
these organizations was to translate Polish literature into French, to stage theater performances in Polish, and to study the Polish language.
Paris was also a Mecca of Romanian exiles, facilitated by the linguistic ties
between Romanian and French. Although the Romanians had neither the
critical mass nor the means to establish Parisian literary institutions that could
compare with those of the Poles, they played a crucial role in the cultural and
political awakening of their people. Most of the liberal Romanian Westernizers including the important political leaders and writers C. A. Rosetti, Ion
C. Bratianu, Vasile Alecsandri, Alecu Russo, Mihail Kogalniceanu, Ion Ghica,
and Ion Heliade Radulescu fled to Paris after the defeat of the 1848 revolutions in the Romanian Principalities. Most of them contributed to Romanian
literature (especially to the epistolary genre) in the French language. Heliade
Radulescu, whose exile in Paris lasted nine years, underwent a significant evolution from his earlier revolutionary animus to a more traditionalist position.
In Mmoires sur lhistoire de la rgneration roumaine (Memories of the History of
the Romanian Regeneration; 1851), he concluded that the Romanian revolution had failed because it neglected the continuity of national traditions,
though Moldova and Walachia were still separated at the time and did not always view themselves as belonging to a single nation. The original French version of Alecu Russos prose poem Cntarea Romniei (Song of Romania; 1855)
described a mythic rather than a real homeland.
Twentieth-century exiles from Poland and Romania were thus able follow
the trajectories and footsteps of their nineteenth-century predecessors,
whom they regarded as writers that conceptualized and truly represented
their national culture. This was not, however, the case with the Czechs, for
23
only two major Czech writers went into exile during the nineteenth century:
Karel Havlcek Borovsky and Josef Vclav Fric. Havlcek, the first great
Czech journalist, was twice tried for sedition and finally deported in December 1851 to the South-Tyrolean town of Brixen. There he wrote his Tyrolsk elegie (Tyrolean Elegies) and two long satirical poems against Russian
and Austrian absolutism, which circulated in manuscript form until they were
published posthumously, in 1861 and 1870 respectively. Fric, a leader of the
radical students in 184849, was imprisoned in the years 185154, arrested
again in 1858, and then released the following year on the condition that he
leave the country. He lived in London, Paris, and Berlin before he could return
to Prague in 1880. Havlcek and Fric did not become symbols of an exiled
Czech national culture as the romantic poets did for the Poles. Twentieth-century Czechs (except perhaps Kundera) tended to look at exile rather in terms
of Viktor Dyks oft-quoted adage from 1921: not the homeland but those
leaving it will perish (Fentres; qtd. in Skvoreckys Moscow Blues 215).
Only few Slovak, Hungarian, Croat, and Serb writers went into exile in the
nineteenth-century, and those who did were usually drawn to the German/
Austrian, and, less frequently, to the English cultural orbit. They attended
German universities and often published with German publishers. Mikls
Jsika, for instance, a Hungarian-Transylvanian writer of historical novels,
fled to Brussels to save his life after 184849; later he moved on to Germany
rather than Paris because his wife and his publishers were German.
Hungarian writers continued to pay secondary attention to Paris in the first
decades of the twentieth century. To be sure, the greatest Hungarian modernist poet, Endre Ady, found a second home in Paris prior to World War I, and
Lajos Kassk, the most important figure of the avant-garde, pilgrimaged
there on foot in 1909 an event he commemorated in 1922 with his long, and
perhaps best, poem A l meghal, a madarak kireplnek (The Horse Dies the
Birds Fly Away). However, when World War I broke out, the patriotic Bla
Balzs symptomatically declared in the Nyugat: Paris was our first great casualty. [] We no longer like Paris (Aug. 16/Sept. 1, 1914: 200). When Kassk
had to flee from Hungary in 1919, he settled in Vienna, not Paris (see va
Forgcss essay in this volume).
Masses of poor people left East-Central Europe around the turn of the
twentieth century to seek a better life overseas, but hardly any fled for political
reasons. Those writers who left, temporarily or permanently, became expatriates rather than exiles, and they settled in Europe rather than overseas. Joseph
Conrad, the most famous one of those who left permanently, traversed the
world but settled in England. Some key figures of early East-Central European
Modernism went abroad as temporary expatriates but returned later. Stanisaw
24
Chapter I
Przybyszewski started to write in Berlin, but became the leading figure of

Polish Modernism only once he returned to Cracow in 1898. The Hungarian
Ady went seven times to Paris between 1904 and 1911 because of the lure of the
city and of a married woman he called Lda. Perhaps only the Latvian Aspazia
and Janis Rainis were genuine East-European exiles during the prewar period:
they fled to Switzerland after the failure of the 1905 Russian revolution.
Exodus from Hungary in 1919

During and after World War I, masses of people were forcibly displaced, but,
as mentioned, this involved only few writers. The first major twentieth-century exodus of East-Central European writers was not part of a larger mass
movement of refugees. It consisted of artists and intellectuals of liberal, socialist, and communist persuasion, who feared, justifiably, the worst when
right-wing extremists assumed power in Hungary and the country lost a substantial part of its population to the surrounding countries. The bloodletting
in the countrys cultural life possibly surpassed the brain drain that followed
the suppression of the 1956 revolution.
A few words on the background of this first exile wave may be useful. The
Hungarian anti-war and social protest started to gain momentum in 191617,
as it became gradually evident that the central powers were losing the war. The
March 1, 1917 issue of the leading journal, Nyugat, was confiscated because of
Mihly Babitss powerful anti-war poem. Oszkr Jszis journal Huszadik szzad became the organ of the young anti-war sociologists and political scientists who envisioned a Danubian Federation, whereas Lajos Kassks Tett and
its successor Ma rallied the avant-garde writers and artists, who had revolutionary-utopian visions of a creative new humankind (see va Forgcss article below). The Sunday Circle started in the winter of 1915. Dreamed up by
Bla Balzs and led by Gyrgy Lukcs, it involved brilliant young intellectuals,
such as the sociologist Karl Mannheim, the art historian Arnold Hauser, the
philosopher Bla Fogarasi, the poet Anna Lesznai, the psychologist Julia
Lng, the art historian Frederick Antal, as well as Emma Ritok, Edith Hajs,
and Anna Hamvassy. Leaning at that point towards a leftist philosophical
idealism, the members became more radical in 191819 and assumed leading
roles in the culture of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic. The Galileo
Circle, finally, was a radical but non-violent student organization at the university, with some members engaging in illegal action. The leaders included
Jszi and the Polnyi brothers Kroly (its first President) and Mihly, both of
whom became later highly respected Western intellectuals.
25
The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy led in October 1918 to a

bloodless bourgeois revolution and a republican government under the
leadership of Count Mihly Krolyi. The Hungarian Communist Party was
founded on November 24, and its ranks quickly swelled with intellectuals and
returning soldiers. In the December 1918 issue of Szabadgondolat, the journal
of the Galileo Circle edited by Kroly Polnyi, Lukcs still pondered Bolshevisms moral question, but later that month he joined the Communist Party
(Congdon, Exile 2930). He was not entirely welcome. As Jzsef Lengyel remembers, a major conflict developed in the editorial offices of the communist
paper Vrs jsg when Lukcs and the spiritual group behind him offered
their services. The group around Ott Korvin, including Lengyel and Jzsef
Rvai, distrusted the idealism of the Lukcs people, and could not understand
why Bla Kun, the leader of the Party who had just returned from Russia, had
accepted Lukcss help (Visegrdi utca 101). Indeed, the Lukcs circle was
preoccupied with the Dostoyevskian question whether violence and killing
could sometimes be justified, and several members, among them Ervin Sink,
could not condone brutality, not even as a sacrifice for a future humane society. But Lukcs, once he turned away from Dostoyevsky, steadfastly held on
to a new anti-idealism.
In March 1919, Krolyi could no longer resist the internal and external
pressures and offered his power to the communists, who established a proletarian dictatorship under Bla Kun. Many writers and intellectuals supported
the new regime, though most of them became gradually disillusioned by its violence and ineffectuality. Lukcs, to be sure, became a highly effective Commissar of Education and Culture who appointed the best talents to the leading
cultural institutions (Congdon, Exile 3637). Jszi and his circle opposed all
forms of dictatorship, whereas Kassk, a radical individualist, rejected the
dominance of the Party and its politicians (see va Forgcss article below).
A word has to be said here of the unjustly neglected writer Ervin Sink,
whose life and work will crop up repeatedly in our account. Born in Apatin,
now in the Serbian Vojvodina, Sink started to publish during the war in the
social-democratic newspaper Npszava, as well as in Kassks A Tett and Ma.
He quit the Ma circle, together with Jzsef Rvai, Aladr Komjt, and others,
to become a founding member of the Hungarian Communist Party. In May
1919, he succeeded as the military commander of the town Kecskemt in getting a mild sentence (ideological retraining) for the participants of a suppressed counter-revolutionary uprising. For this, he was sharply criticized
later by Otto Korvin and his terrorist group called Lenin Boys.
Though a fervent revolutionary, Sink abhorred violence. Jzsef Lengyel
remembers him as the most interesting person of the Soviet headquarters,
26
Chapter I
a very young boy who sported an enormous black beard and black shirt.
He talked inordinately much but it was really interesting (Visegrdi utca 174).
After Kecskemt, Sink made the so called Soviet house in Budapest his
home, and he became the center of a debate, which had, according to Lengyel, no little influence on the politics of the Hungarian dictatorship (175).
The debate concerned Dostoevskys Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov: Sink disliked him and took the side of Christ, whereas Lukcs and
his group sided with the Grand Inquisitor. Sink managed to win over some
in the Soviet House. The moralists honored in him the repentant sinner,
while Korvin called him an impostor siding with the counter-revolution
(Lengyel 177). Sadly, the counter-revolutionary officers, whose life Sink
saved in Kecskemt, perpetrated one of the worst bloodbaths during the
White Terror in Orgovny. Korvin was arrested in Hungary and executed
after a brief trial before the end of the year. Balzs dedicated a poem to his
memory, but Sink reaffirmed in 1922 his continued opposition to Korvins
ideology: It is my belief that the inhumanity now expressed by the raging
White Terror will not be eradicated from the hearts by a raging red terror taking its place (Az t 66).
Arthur Koestler, at the time only fourteen, remembers the Commune with
surpring warmth and sympathy, though his father was owner of a small soap
factory: During those hundred days of spring it looked indeed as if the globe
were to be lifted from its axis [] Even at school strange and exciting events
were taking place. New teachers appeared who spoke to us in a new voice, and
treated us as if we were adults, with an earnest, friendly seriousness. Those
were days of a hopeful and exuberant mood. The family fled when the
Commune was defeated and Romanian troops took over Budapest (Arrows
62, 64, 6869). Gyula Hy, just five years older than Koestler, had no role in
the Commune, but the family thought it wise to send him to Dresden to study.
Years later, Hy and Koestler met in Switzerland and held a joint wedding.
Many exiles of 1919 were young writers and intellectuals, usually Jewish,
who saw no possibilities to develop their talents in postwar and post-revolutionary Hungary. Some of them went to Germany, many of them became expatriates rather than exiles. The young Sndor Mrai, neither a Jew nor a communist (though he did publish two articles in the Vrs jsg), went into
emigration from his hometown Kassa (just becoming the Czechoslovak Kosice) to Leipzig, Weimar, and Frankfurt. As he recounts in his fictional autobiography Egy polgr vallomsai (Confessions of a Citoyen; 1934), he stayed a few
years in Berlin before moving on to Paris in 1923, and finally returning to
Hungary in 1928. He could not anticipate that he would be forced into genuine exile twenty years after these expatriate years.
27
Fleeing the Nazis: 193839

A few Romanian and Polish writers left their countries in the 1920s and 30s.
The Romanians, among them Benjamin Fondane, Claude Sernet, Ilarie Voronca, and Emil Cioran, all migrated to Paris and were cultural rather than
genuine political exiles, though for Jewish writers like Fondane the increasingly anti-Semitic climate in Romania was a deterrent to return. In contrast,
the Polish writers Bruno Jasienski, Witold Wandurski, and Ryszard Stande
were communists; they gravitated towards the Soviet Union and perished
there prematurely in the purges.The great waves of exiles were set off by the
German invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938 and of Poland on September 1,
1939, followed by the Soviet attack on Poland on September 17.
The Czech and Slovak writers fled westward, with exception of the cultural
historian Zdenek Nejedly, who went to Moscow. Frantisek Langer, Pavel Tigrid, Jir Mucha, Viktor Fischl, Egon Hostovsky, Theo Florin, and Vladimir
Clementis (a communist, who protested against the Molotov-Ribbentrop
pact) all fled to England or the US, some of them after a brief stay in Paris.
The trajectory of Polish exiles fleeing westward was considerably more circuitous, for the direct route was cut off. They had to undertake dangerous and
difficult journeys, usually via Romania or Hungary. The Skamander poets Julian Tuwim, Antoni Sonimski, Kazimierz Wierzynski, and Jan Lechon, as well
as their friend and editor Mieczysaw Grydzewski, fled via Romania. They
went on to France, and were soon forced to flee further: Sonimski and
Grydzewski landed in London, whereas Tuwim and Lechon were shipped
from Portugal to Rio de Janeiro and went on to New York after a peaceful
year in Rio. Their paths parted after the war: Tuwim returned to Poland in
1946; Sonimski, after some hesitation, in 1951, just when Miosz bolted from
his diplomatic post in Paris. The returning poet attacked the fresh exile in an
open letter with Stalinist rhetoric (Shore 29193), but in the years to come,
Sonimski regained his sarcastic wit, directing it increasingly against the communist regime. Lechon stayed in New York but became isolated and finally
committed suicide in 1956; Grydzewski stayed in London and became editor
of the important exile journal Wiadomosci Literackie; Wierzynski worked for
Radio Free Europe and published first in the Wiadomosci, and later more at
Kulturas Instytut Literacki. Other exiles fleeing via Romania included Melchior Wankowicz, who went via Tel Aviv to Italy, and young Jerzy Pietrkiewicz, who went via France to England.
A number of Polish writers fled to Hungary. Jerzy Stempowski went on
from there via Yugoslavia and Italy to Bern, Zygmunt Haupt and Jzef obodowski to France. Haupt managed to get to England, but obodowski was
28
Chapter I
arrested on the way in Spain. He was released in 1943 and remained there until
the end of his life. Those who decided to stay in Hungary included Stanisaw
Vincenz, who went to Switzerland after the war, as well as Adam Bahdaj, Tadeusz Fangrat, Lew Kaltenberg, and Andrzej Stawar, all of whom returned to
Poland after surviving the war in Budapest. Kazimiera Iakowiczwna survived in Kolozsvr/Cluj, where she wrote her moving poem Pogrom in Kolozsvar on the deportation of Jews (Maciejewska 27576). Finally, Czesaw
Straszewicz and Witold Gombrowicz were on the maiden voyage of a cruise
ship when the war broke out. The latter stayed in Buenos Aires until 1963,
whereas Straszewicz returned to France.
Many communist and leftist Polish writers, including former futurists, tried
to escape the invading German troops by fleeing southeastward to Lww (the
Austro-Hungarian Lemberg), which became the Ukrainian-Soviet Lviv as
soon as the Soviet troops invaded Poland from the east. As Aleksander Wat
remarks, this loveliest Polish city lost its beauty and was terrorized by November-December: the Soviets had barely arrived, and all at once everything was
covered in mud (of course it was fall), dirty, gray, shabby. People began cringing and slinking down the streets. Right away people started wearing ragged
clothes; obviously they were afraid to be seen in their better clothes (104).
Tragic stories of Polish communists who vanished in the Soviet Union
reminded the newcomers that Soviet-occupied Lww was unsafe, even if you
were a Polish communist or leftist. Wanda Wasilewska fared best. To be sure,
her husband was accidentally murdered (probably by the NKVD), but she
later married the Ukrainian writer Oleksandr Korneichuk, became a Soviet
citizen, a member of the Supreme Soviet, a high-ranking officer, and Stalins
favorite. She received three times the Stalin Prize in literature, and returned to
Poland only for visits. Jerzy Putrament, and Jerzy Borejsza also found a place
in the Soviet system; they returned to Poland with the Soviet-Polish Army in
1944 to become cultural functionaries of the communist regime. Julian
Stryjkowski, Adolf Rudnicki, Adam Wazyk, and others accommodated themselves to the Soviet system, supported the communist Polish regime after the
war, but eventually rebelled against it. Stryjkowski returned his Party membership book in 1956; Wazyk did the same in 1957, two years after lashing out
at the system in his Poemat dla dorosych (A Poem for Adults).
Others did considerably worse. As Lww and its surrounding area became
incorporated into the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, the Polish writers who fled
to a still Polish city came under pressure to approve publicly the annexation
and accept Soviet citizenship (see Shore 15860, Piotrowski 7779, and
Wat 97123). Among those who briefly stayed in Lww were the former futurists and avant-gardists Aleksander Wat, Anatol Stern, Wadysaw Bro-
29
niewski, and Tadeusz Peiper, all of whom turned into communists or communist sympathizers in the course of the 1920s. Wat founded and edited the
important Marxist Miesiecznik Literacki (Literary Monthly; 192931) and was
imprisoned for it, but by the time he got to Lww he no longer sympathized
with Communism, and the Soviet authorities regarded him with skepticism.
He was welcomed in the new Writers Union and the Editorial Board of new
Polish-Soviet newspaper Czerwony Sztandard (Red Banner), but for a short
time only: Stern, Wat, Peiper, Broniewski, Teodor Parnicki, and others were
arrested on January 23, 1940 by means of a grotesque provocation at a dinner
party that was also attended by Boris Pasternak (Wat 11823, Shore 16569).
In conversations with Czesaw Miosz shortly before his death, posthumously turned into the book Moi wiek (partial English translation in My Century), Wat movingly recalled his Odyssey through thirteen Soviet prisons
and his banishment to Alma Ata. Stern was freed after three months, but
Broniewski, a great poetic talent and one not to cave in during the interrogations, was kept in jail until August 1941. He was then exiled for five years
to Kazakhstan, but upon the outbreak of the German/Soviet war he was
allowed to enlist in General Anderss Polish army. As a communist, he felt
uncomfortable in Anderss decidedly anti-communist army, and the commander dispatched him to the Polish Information Center in Jerusalem. A
gentile and an atheist, Broniewski wrote there poetry, gave lectures, and cultivated contacts with Jews from Poland and remained a convinced communist, in spite of his Soviet jail experiences. Early 1946 he returned to liberated Poland. Leo Lipski, who also fled to Lww and reached Palestine by
means of Anderss army, stayed in Jerusalem and continued to write novels in
the Polish language.
Several other Polish writers who fled to Lww and got into Soviet jails or
camps were also released in 1941 to join Anderss army. Parnicki got out of an
eight-year jail sentence; Marian Czuchnowski, a former Cracow avant-guard
poet, and Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski were in gulag camps and released 1941
and 1942 respectively. Herling came to fight with Anderss 2nd Corps in Italy
and gave an account of his gulag experiences in Inny swiat (1953; trans as A
World Apart, 1986), while Czuchnowski reached London with Anderss army
via the Middle East.
Three major writers stayed in Lww, even after the German troops took
elenski, the former
over the city on July 4, 1941: the ageing Tadeusz Boy-Z
elenski, who beavant-garde poet Julian Przybos, and Halina Grska. Boy-Z
came head of the French Department at the Sovietized university, was immediately shot by the Germans; Grska was killed by them in 1942, whereas
Przybos was only arrested, and survived.
30
Chapter I
German troops occupied Hungary only in 1944, but the Horthy government had enacted laws that curtailed the rights of Jews already in May 1938,
April 1939, and August 1941. In light of these laws, and the imminent war,
many Hungarian writers of Jewish descent left the country in 193839. They
included Gyrgy Faludy, Endre Havas (the model of Arthur Koestlers protagonist in Arrival and Departure: Koestler, Stranger 31), Ferenc Fejto, Pl Ignotus, Bertalan Hatvany, Tibor Tardos, Ferenc Molnr, and Andor Nmeth.
With the exception of Molnr, all of these writers were of socialist or communist persuasion, and this was usually as decisive an impulse for departure as
their Jewishness. Ignotus, for instance, had founded in 1936 the leftist literary
journal Szp Sz with the financial help of Bertalan Hatvany, the editorial contributions of Fejto, and the participation of the great poet Attila Jzsef, who
committed suicide in 1937. Fejto fled the country to avoid arrest for one of
his publications; the composer Bla Bartk, a prominent contributor to Szp
Sz, departed in protest against the Jewish laws, the governments general policy, and the imminent war.
Serbians Milos Crnjanski, Jovan Ducic, and Rastko Petrovic quit the Yugoslav diplomatic service and stayed privately in London and the US. Mircea
Eliade, whom the New York Time once called exile from eternity, remained
a Romanian diplomat in Lisbon (194244) and adopted a positive attitude towards Salazars fascist regime. Only after opting for exile in 1946, did Eliade
return to the idea that aspirations of the spirit, embodied in the figure of the
enlightened intellectual, rise above history. He became involved in the anticommunist Romanian emigration in Paris, launching the journal Luceafarul
and formally breaking with the Romanian regime a few years later.
We have to mention here a group that may well be the strangest of all exile
formations in our study: the Romanian Iron Guard (founded 1930), the paramilitary political arm of Corneliu Zelea Codreanus Legion of the Archangel
Michael (1927). The fascist, anti-Semitic, and pro-Nazi Legionnaires were both
perpetrators and victims of bloody massacres and assassinations in fighting
against centrists, leftists, as well as other right-wing formations. They came to
power in 1940 in alliance with General Ion Antonescu, but after an unsuccessful coup and pogroms in 1941 Antonescu suppressed them with German consent. Several hundred Legionnaires fled then to Germany, where they were
arrested and interned 194244 in a special section of the Buchenwald concentration camp (see Weber 107, and Ronnetts apologist, pro-Legionnaire book).
Weber, relying on data in Constantin Papanaces pro-Legionnaire Martiri Legionari, evocari (Legionnaire Martyrs Remembered) showed that these fascists were
mostly students and young professionals. This provides a background for the
surprisingly large number of writers and intellectuals that our overview had to
31
associate with the Iron-Guard, whether they were actual members of it or not.
Mircea Eliade and Emil Cioran sympathized with the Iron Guard in the 1930s.
We know (see our passage on Madrid as a site of exile) that Horia Stamatu was in
Buchenwald, and that Vintila Horia was also in Nazi camps after his arrest in
Vienna in 1944, due to Romanias switch to the Allies.
Escaping and Homecoming in 194445

The Yalta conference of the Allied Powers in January 1945 formally divided
Europe into Eastern and Western power zones, and the Potsdam Conference
of July-August the same year confirmed the new international borders.
Though full-fledged Soviet-style regimes were established in East-Central Europe only a few years later, we may regard Yalta as the date that split migr
cultures from domestic ones (see Marta Wyka). Of the several hundredthousand East-Central Europeans that found themselves in Western Europe
at the end of the war among them some two-hundred-thousand members of
the Polish army attached to the London government in exile, and former inmates of German concentration camps a high percentage refused to return
to the Soviet-ruled countries. They stayed in Western Europe or went overseas, mainly to the USA and Canada, but also to South America and Australia.
Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski, co-founder of the Paris Instytut Literacki and the
journal Kultura, stayed in Italy, Tadeusz Nowakowski, who had been in German concentration camps and then, for two years, in DP camps, spent several
years in Italy, England, and the US before settling in Munich as contributor to
Radio Free Europe. Marian Pankowski, also a concentration-camp survivor,
settled in Brussels as Professor of Slavic Studies at the Free University.
The exilic wheel of fortune took an astonishing turn in 194445. While
many returned home from Moscow, London, New York, and elsewhere, Nazi
sympathizers, supporters of Nazi puppet governments, staunch anti-communists and anti-Semites now fled westward with the retreating Nazis to escape
the advancing Soviet troops. The refugees from the East, including those
from the Baltic countries and the Ukraine, did not foresee that they would
have to spend tough years in DP camps before settling in a country that was
willing to admit them.
Escapes
Of the handful of Nazi collaborators among the Polish, Czech, and Serbian
writers, we should mention the Pole Ferdynand Goetel, President of the
Polish PEN Club and of the Polish Writers Union in the interwar years, who
32
Chapter I
fled to London, and the Serbian Vladimir Velmar-Jankovic. The latter served
as assistant to the Serbian Minister of Culture and Religion in the Nazi puppet
government, fled 1944 to Rome and, two years later, to Barcelona, where he
started to write under the penname of V.J. Wukmir. His works have become
available in Serbia after the collapse of Yugoslavia, but efforts by his daughter,
the Serbian writer Svetlana Velmar-Jankovic, to get him officially rehabilitated, ran into opposition.
The situation was quite different in Slovakia and Croatia, two Catholic
countries in which the Nazis installed Jozef Tiso and Ante Pavelics Ustase
movement. These puppet governments enjoyed a certain popular support because they liberated the two countries from federations (Czechoslovakia and
Yugoslavia) in which they were the junior partners. Unexplainably, the analogous situations did not produce similar effects on writers. Apparently, no
major Croatian writer supported the Ustase and none fled subsequently to the
West, whereas a number of Catholic Slovak writers supported Tiso, hoping
that his regime would lead to a genuinely independent state. Most of these
Catholic Slovak writers among them Rudolf Dilong, Mikuls Sprinc, Stanislav Meciar, Jn Okl, and Jozef Cger-Hronsky fled to Italy, and from there,
with the help of the Vatican, to Buenos Aires and North America. Andrej
arnov and Milo Urban were extradited by the Allies. The latter received only
Z
a reprimand at home, and lived in Croatia for several decades before returning
to Czechoslovakia in 1974.
As members of the Romanian Orthodox Church, the Romanian Legionnaires and their sympathizers could not count on Vatican help to escape. Most
of them stayed in Europe, but quite a few of them, for instance, Alexander
Ronnett, managed to immigrate to the Midwest in the US. Vintila Horia, who
was cultural attach in Rome and Vienna during the war, spent several years in
Italy (194448) and Argentina (194853) before settling in Madrid. Traian Popescu, who served in the Romanian Embassy of Slovakia during the war, escaped to Austria and from there, in 1947, to Madrid. He started there the proLegionnaire journal Carpatii with Aron Cotrus. Pamfil Seicaru, editor of the
anti-Semitic Cuvntul (The Word) and supporter of Romanias Jewish Laws,
was condemned to death in absentia by a Romanian court on June 4, 1945. He
lived in Madrid some thirty years before moving to Dachau, Germany. Horia
Stamatu, a Legionnaire inmate of Buchenwald, went to study in Freiburg/
i. Breisgau, where he established in 1949 a Romanian exile and cultural center.
Director of the Center became later Paul Miron, Professor of Romanian at the
university and editor of the Jahrbuch Dacoromania, a nationally tinged journal,
as indicated by its title. Stamatu himself spent a decade in Madrid (195161)
before returning to Freiburg.
33
The right-wing Hungarian writers settled mostly in Germany, Argentina,

Madrid, the US, and Canada. Jzsef Nyro fled to Germany, and, in 1952, to
Madrid; his A zld csillag appeared in 1950, the same year he founded the Hungarian publishing house Kossuth Knyvkiad in Cleveland. Albert Wass (see
John Neubauers article on him in this volume) went to the US in 1951, after
several years in a DP camp and a stay in Hamburg. He later claimed that his
admission was delayed for several years by a woman called Rosenberg in the
State Department.
Josef Mackiewicz was the most important Polish writer fleeing with the retreating German troops (on Mackiewicz, see Bolecki, who also wrote the
present account on him). He had fought in the so-called Polish-Bolshevik war
of 191920 as a volunteer soldier against Red Army troops, for he regarded
this as a struggle for democracy, freedom, and the independence of his homeland, and a resistance against Bolshevik ideology. Mackiewicz embraced antiCommunism as a moral and philosophical world-view in the many articles he
wrote in the 1920s and 30s about the USRR as a totalitarian state.
During the Soviet occupation of Vilnius ( June 1940 June 1941) Mackiewicz became a woodcutter and a carter in forests, for he refused to agitate
against Western civilization and the Second Polish Republic. When the Germans took over Vilnius, they asked Mackiewicz to become the editor-in-chief
of a German-supported Polish newspaper. Mackiewicz refused, but he published in it during the following months five articles (including two chapters
of the novel he was writing) under his own name, about Soviet lawlessness,
deportations, murders, and other atrocities.
In 1942, Mackiewicz spread his two book-length manuscripts among
Polish readers in the Vilnius region. The first one concerned the Polish governments responsibility for the military catastrophe in September 1939,
which led to accusations that he opposed and libeled it. The second manuscript was a novel about the Sovietization of the Vilnius region. Both manuscripts mentioned anti-Semitic Polish attitudes, which led to rumbles that he
cast aspersions on his people.
In April 1943, the Germans asked Mackiewicz to observe in the Katyn
forest the opening of the graves of Polish soldiers killed by the Soviet NKVD
in April 1940. Mackiewicz asked the authorities of the Polish Underground
State (AK) for permission to participate in the inspection; the Head of the
Polish Resistance in Vilnius consented, and gave him permission to be interviewed upon returning from Katyn. Mackiewicz wrote a special report for the
Authorities of the Polish Army in Warsaw. The interview with him, titled
Widziaem na wasne oczy (I Saw it with my Own Eyes), was published in
June 1943 in Goniec Codzienny, a German-controlled Polish newspaper in Vil-
34
Chapter I
nius. This was the only way Mackiewicz could publicize in the Polish community of the Vilnius region that he was sure that the Soviet NKVD had committed the massacre. Unofficial accusations now emerged that Mackiewicz
collaborated with the Germans, and he was probably sentenced to death upon
the instigation of Soviet agents (though this is not documented in writing),
but the Polish authorities, which knew him as a patriotic and anti-Bolshevik
writer, refused to carry out the sentence.
When the Red Army re-entered Eastern Poland in 1944, Mackiewicz knew
that the communist authorities would execute him as a witness of the Katyn
graves and a well-known anti-communist writer. He escaped to Italy in January 1945, where he cooperated as a journalist with the Polish Army. He published the collected documents about the massacre in The Katyn Wood Murders
(German ed. 1949) and he gave testimony about it to a special commission of
the US Congress.
Mackiewicz also wrote on the extermination of Jews in the Vilnius region,
claiming that the leaders of the Polish Army made many political mistakes
during the last phase of World War II, for instance by downplaying the danger
of Soviet ideology and the Soviet occupation of Poland, and by not informing
the population about the Soviet deportation of Poles to concentration camps
and the extermination of Polish soldiers and other citizens. While Polish
migr propaganda claimed that Poland had shared with the Allies a victory in
World War II, Mackiewicz held that the war had been the worst catastrophe in
Polish history.
In response to these views, Mackiewicz opponents started to attack him as a
German collaborator. They claimed, incorrectly, that he had been the editorin-chief of the German newspaper during the war, as well as a critic of the Polish
Catholic Church and of the Vaticans policy concerning the USRR and the communist system. Another wave of accusations started when Mackiewicz asserted
in Sieg der Provokation (The Victory of Provocation; 1964) that the Germans
treated Polish citizens better than the Jews. Characteristically, some migr officials agreed with the Polish communists, because they considered Mackiewiczs anti-Communism as evidence of his collaboration with the Germans.
Czesaw Miosz, Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski, Aleksander Wat, Jerzy Giedroyc, and other outstanding Polish writers highly admired Maczkiewiczs
novels, and even his critics acknowledged that they were unique and eminent.
Mackiewicz categorically rejected nationalist ideologies, which, in his view,
destroyed the solidarity among the people of Eastern Europe and enabled the
Bolsheviks and Nazis to conquer them. Maczkiewicz promulgated the idea of
homelands, of historical regions shared by different nations; multicultural
East-Central European homelands were to override borders between states.
35
Homecoming
While the mentioned fascists and anti-communists fled in 1945, those communists who fled to Moscow before and during the war and survived the Stalinist purges could now repatriate. Next to communist politicians, who returned home with Stalins assignments, a number of communist writers came
home as well: apart from the Czech Zdenek Nejedly and a number of Polish
writers, they were Germans, who settled in what became the German Democratic Republic, and many Hungarians, including Bla Balzs, Andor Gbor,
Gyula Hy, Bla Ills, Gyrgy Lukcs, and Jzsef Rvai. John Mcza stayed in
Moscow as a teacher of aesthetics and art history, Jzsef Lengyel was released
from captivity only in 1955, and the artist Bla Uitz continued to work in the
Soviet Union until 1975. No significant Romanian, Croatian, or Serb writers
had lived in Moscow during the war.
Lukcs claimed that 1945 was a homecoming in the true sense for him
(Record 166). Was it, really? Did he forget his youthful insight that the condition of humanity in the modern world was transcendental homelessness?
True, Lukcs and Rvai came to play important cultural and political roles
after 1945. Rvai became Minister of Culture (npmuvels) in the communist regime, a member of the innermost triumvirate that ruled with an iron fist during the Stalinist years. Lukcs wielded less though still considerable power in
silencing non-communist writers and forcing some, like Sndor Mrai, into
Western exile (see Szegedy-Maszk 12325, and, as a counter-voice, Galin Tihanovs article below). However, his star quickly faded. By 1949, Rvai and his
associates started to castigate publicly their erstwhile friend and fellow exile
for ideological deviations and for preferring bourgeois writers like Thomas
Mann to Soviet writers. Lukcs lost political clout, and, once more, he had to
confess in public that he had made mistakes. As to Balzs, he became an international celebrity but was deliberately ignored at home until his death in
1949. The Balzs manuscripts in the Hungarian National Library (Box 3) contain an exchange of letters from 1948, in which Rvai sharply criticized Balzss and Zoltn Kodlys Czinka Panna baladja (Panna Czinkas Ballad) as
mistaken in its content, politically harmful, and therefore also an artistically
failed piece.
Rvai remained the potentate of culture in the Stalinist years (194953), but
was forced into the background during the reform years that led to the revolution of 1956. As an opponent of the revolution, he fled for a second time
to the Soviet Union in October; he returned in March 1957, but his name was
so tainted that the Kdr regime had no use for him. The 1956 uprising
brought Lukcs (reluctantly) back to power as Minister of Culture; after a
brief exile in Romania he was tolerated, but officially ignored. Hy towed the
36
Chapter I
line for several years after his return as Director of the Society for SovietHungarian Friendship, but he gradually turned into a reform communist and
a follower of Imre Nagy. His satirical essay on the communist bureaucrats,
Why I dont like Comrade Kucsera, became an important ferment in the debates leading to up to the revolution. After its suppression, he was given a sixyear sentence, but released in 1960. In 1965, he went once more into exile
this time, however, in western direction, which allowed him to write and publish his memoirs.
Writers who had fled to the West and returned to their home country after
the war were received with suspicion, and many of them were arrested once
the communists consolidated their power. In greatest danger were those who
had some political or military role in the West during the war, for instance in
the Czech or Polish exile governments and armies. The Polish authorities arrested many returnees, though Julian Tuwim, returning from New York in
1946, Roman Brandstaetter, returning from Israel in 1948, and Antoni Sonimski, returning from London in 1951, were well received and left unharmed. In 1945, Pavel Tigrid and Viktor Fischl returned from London, as
did Ferdinand Peroutka from a concentration camp. Jir Mucha followed in
1947. All of them were initially well received, but the 1948 communist takeover forced Tigrid, Fischl, Peroutka and others to escape once more. Tigrid
received a journalist assignment abroad at the right moment and remained
in Paris, Peroutka went to London, whereas Fischl immigrated to Israel and
became a diplomat under the assumed name of Avigdor Dagan, although he
continued to write in Czech. Mucha, however, sat in jail between 1948 and
1953. Even more tragic was the fate of the Slovak communists Theo Florin
and Vladimir Clementis, who also returned from London in 1945 in order to
enter Czechoslovak diplomatic service. Florin became the personal secretary
of Clementis when the latter was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs in
1948, but both were arrested in 1950 on trumped-up charges. Clementis was
executed in 1952, whereas Florin was jailed and then released in 1953, after
Stalins death.
A number of writers living abroad accepted diplomatic appointments in
the postwar years, but resigned when it became their task sell the Party line in
the West. Milada Souckov became the Czechoslovak cultural attach in New
York in 1945, and resigned in 1948; her compatriot Egon Hostovsky entered
diplomatic service in Norway in 1947 and resigned in 1949. Count Mihly Krolyi, the leader of the 1918 pink revolutionary government, returned to
Hungary in 1946 and was appointed that year Ambassador to Paris. He engaged there Endre Havas, a writer of communist convictions who had been
his personal secretary in London since 1942, Ferenc Fejto, who survived the
37
war hiding in France, and the writer and folklorist Zoltn Szab. Cardinal
Mindszentys trial in Budapest in 1949 and the subsequent trial and execution
of the veteran communist Lszl Rajk led, however, to the resignation of Krolyi, Fejto, and Szab; the latter two asked for asylum in France. Gyrgy
Schpflin, the Hungarian Ambassador to Sweden, resigned in 1950 and
moved to London.
Those former exiles who returned to Hungary after a diplomatic service
abroad fared badly. To be sure, Krolyi remained a persona grata in Hungary,
but Havas, who sent secret reports on his superiors to Hungary, obeyed a recall in 1950, was arrested the same year, and tortured to death in 1953. The
dying, by now legendary, Ignotus was flown back by the Hungarian government in 1948. When he died in August 1949, his son, Pl Ignotus, cultural attach of the postwar Hungarian government in London, flew home for his funeral, was prevented from leaving again, and arrested in 1949. In the
notorious torture prison at Andrssy t 60 (today a museum serving questionable anti-communist propaganda), he kept a jail diary (Brtnnaplm), in which
he flagelated himself with aphorisms like the following: Kellett neki London
helyett Pest? / Megtanulta: aki mer az veszt (Did he want Pest rather than
London? / He learned: he who dares loses; September 5, 1949); Pedig ha
ma nzhetnk a / Tkrbe, [] Ennyit szlnk [] / Mindssze kr te
(If I could look into the mirror today Id only say: you blithering idiot; September 26, 1949). He was released and rehabilitated in March 1956, participated in the intellectual ferment leading up to the revolution, and departed
for London when the Russians suppressed it this time for good.
The Romanians who quit diplomatic service included Stefan Baciu and
Alexandru Cioranescu. The former left in 1949 the post of Press Secretary at
the Romanian Embassy in Bern, went to Rio de Janeiro and the US mainland
before settling in Honolulu. The latter defected from diplomatic service in
France and went in 1948 to teach at the University La Laguna in Tenerife. The
last major writer to defect from diplomatic service was Czesaw Miosz, who
quit in 1951 his post of Cultural Attach at the Polish Embassy in Paris.
Pl Ignotus was not the only Hungarian to return from Western exile after
the war: Gyrgy Plczi-Horvth, Gyrgy Faludy, Tibor Tardos, Lajos Hatvany, Andor Nmeth and others not in service made the same mistake. Except for Andor Nmeth and the internationally famous Hatvany, all of them
were jailed during the next years. Plczi-Horvth, for instance, returned in
1949 and was condemned twice (1950 and 1951) to fifteen years of prison. He
was released after Stalins death in 1954.
38
Chapter I
Racing against the Dropping Iron Curtain: 194750

A few Hungarian exiles managed to cross the border before it closed down in
1948. Lajos Zilahy (1947), Sndor Mrai (1948), and Miksa Fenyo (1948), a
former editor of Nyugat, succeeded, but Gyozo Hatr was caught in 1950 and
condemned for two-and-a-half years in prison. Among the Romanians who
escaped were Miron Butariu (1947 to France), Constantin Virgil Gheorghiu
(1948 to Paris), and Gherasim Luca, who was arrested at the border the first
round but succeeded in his second attempt in 1952. He went via Israel to Paris,
where acquired later a remarkable reputation (see the Paris section below).
The Czech escapees included Ivan Blatny, who came to England in a visiting delegation of Czechoslovak writers. He asked for and received asylum, but
became schizophrenic by 1954 and destroyed many of his poems. The distinguished poet and translator Jan Cep adventurously crossed the border to Bavaria and moved on to Paris. In the years 195155 he was again in Munich,
working for Radio Free Europe, but returned in the end to Paris. The Slovak
Imrich Kruzliak was imprisoned for a year before he was able to flee to Austria in 1949.
The Romanian Virgil Ierunca and his future wife Monica Lovinescu left home
with a fellowship and refused to return in 1948, as did the Hungarian Lszl Cs.
Szab the same year. After a stay in Italy he moved in 1951 to London.
1956
The suppression of the Hungarian revolution forced many politically active
writers into exile. For reform-communists like Tams Aczl and Tibor Mray,
supporters of Imre Nagy, staying at home would have surely meant years of
jail, possibly execution. Indeed, Tibor Dry, Zoltn Zelk, Gyula Hy, Istvn
Ersi, Tibor Tardos, Dezso Keresztry, and Istvn Bib were jailed for several years; Gyula Obersovszky and Jzsef Gli were condemned to death and
pardoned only as a result of international protest. Gyrgy Faludy, Gyrgy Plczi-Horvth, and Pl Ignotus went for a second time into exile. Gyozo
Hatr could now exit without getting arrested. With the exception of Mray,
all these new Hungarian exile writers settled in England and the US rather
than in Paris. gota Kristof, a young poet, went to French Switzerland. She
continued to publish Hungarian poems in exile journals for a number of
years, but once she sufficiently mastered French she embarked on the trilogy
that was to make her famous: Le grand cahier (The Notebook; 1986), La prevue
(The Proof; 1988), and Le troisime mensonge (The Third Lie; 1991).
39
Relatively few writers left East-Central Europe between 1958 and 1968.
The Czech poet Jirina Fuchsov went to the US and launched in 1975 the
Czech poetry publishing company Framar in Los Angeles. The Polish Marek
Hasko went legally to Paris in 1958, then asked for asylum in West Germany
but went, briefly, to Israel. More important was the case of his compatriot Andrzej Stawar, a Marxist who survived the war in Hungary, became Gomulkas
adviser in 1956, but left Poland dying in 1961. He managed to finish before
his death a text that the Polish exile journal Kultura published in October that
year, and Time magazine called the most devastating indictment of the Communist system since Milovan Djilas The New Class (October 27, 1961), because it showed that Stalinist Caesarism still ruled in the Soviet Union. The
Polish regime flew Stawars ashes back to Warsaw with pomp and circumstance, but erased all traces of his memory once the publication appeared and
was smuggled back into Poland. Sawomir Mrozek, the great satirical author
of absurdist plays, left Poland legally in 1963, lived in Italy, and moved to Paris
in 1968. He became an exile when he denounced the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia in Le Monde, but his Emigranci (1974) confronts with biting satire
an intellectual and a worker, two squabbling members of the exile community.
When Jaruzelski proclaimed martial law in 1981, Mrozek forbade publication
and performance of his works in Poland. In 1989 he moved to a ranch in
Mexico, where he started to write his diary; he moved back to Cracow in 1997.
As our timeline in the Appendix shows, Petru Dumitriu, Andrei Codrescu,
and Ion Ioanid were among the few Romanian defectors during the Thaw of
the 1960s. Dumitriu left in 1960 for Germany but then moved to Paris and
started to write in French. Codrescu left in 1965, and went via Italy to the US,
where he quickly established himself in the counter-culture (see our section
on the US as exile host country below). The dissident writer Ion Ioanid, who
was in and out of jail between 1953 and 1969, escaped in 1969 during a trip to
Switzerland and subsequently worked for Radio Free Europe in Munich. His
Inchisoarea noastra cea de toate zilele (Our Everyday Jail; 199196) is one of the
most impressive revelations of prison life behind the Iron Curtain.
Some Polish writers trusting Gomulkas reform Communism moved back
to Poland, Jerzy Sito, a controversial translator of Shakespeare, returned in
1959; Melchior Wankowicz, who was unhappy in the US, returned home in
1962 but was arrested there in 1964 with other protesters and given a threeyear jail sentence.
40
Chapter I
1968 and Beyond

Two rather unconnected major events took place in 1968 that set off new
waves of exile: the Prague Spring and an anti-Semitic campaign within the
Polish Party. Josef Skvorecky, who was in Berkeley during Czechoslovakias
invasion, returned but left again on January 31, 1969, only a few days after Jan
Palach immolated himself in Prague. After several shorter appointments, he
became professor of English literature at the University of Toronto, and
launched with his wife Zdena Salivarov, in 1972, the Sixty-Eight Publishers
(see the section on Toronto below). Antonn Brousek, who also left after the
military invasion, settled in Germany but kept publishing Czech poetry with
the Sixty-Eight Publishers. Ota Filip received in 1969 an eighteen-months
sentence in Prague. After his release, he did physical labor for a living and
wrote for samizdat as well as German publishing outlets. When the authorities finally expelled him, he settled in Munich and adopted German as his primary language of writing. Milan Kundera, who first advocated staying at home,
was finally unable to bear the situation and left the country for France in 1975
(see Vladimr Papouseks article on him below). Kundera, perhaps the most
important Parisian East-Central European author in the final decades of the
century, started to write in French in 1993.
Two distinguished writers of the next Czech generation, Jir Grusa and Libuse Monkov, followed Ota Filip, not only by settling in Germany but also
by adopting German as their main language of writing (Kliems Stummland). In
contrast to the exiles of the 1940s and 50s, there has, indeed, been, a marked
tendency among the later Czech exiles and migrs to adopt the language of
the host country: Kohout, Grusa and Monkov started to write in German,
Linhartov and Kundera in French, and Jan Novk in English.
Grusa, co-founder and editor in Prague of the journal Tvr (Face), started
as a lyrical poet in the early 1960s and became engaged in a series of confrontations with the authorities once he switched to prose. His first novel was labeled pornographic; the underground circulation of his next novel Dotaznk
(The Questionnaire; ms 1975) brought him instantaneous success abroad but
led at home to his brief arrest in 1978 and a prohibition to publish. Dotaznk is
a fictional curriculum vitae, written in answer to a bureaucratic communist
questionnaire for job seekers, but it is also a response to the dogma that novels
must satisfy the criteria of Socialist Realism. Grusas narrator repeatedly comments on the questionnaire and directly addresses the Comrade who demands its completion. Grusas protagonist goes beyond Laurence Sternes
Tristram Shandy by telling not only how he had been conceived but also what
he observed from his mothers womb. He freely drifts back and forth over
41
centuries of family and general history in a racy and erotic style that often
slides into sheer fantasy. Grusa, a signatory of Charta 77, was allowed to exit
from the country in 1980 when he was invited to the US, but was subsequently
prevented from reentering Czechoslovakia and deprived of his citizenship.
He settled in Germany and came to write even German poetry. After 1989, he
became Czechoslovakias Ambassador to Germany and Austria, Minister of
Education in Czechoslovakia, and President of the International Pen Club.
Libuse Monkov left Czechoslovakia legally in 1971, by marrying a German. After studying and teaching comparative literature, she started in Czech
but completed in German her first story, Eine Schdigung (A Damage; 1981).
Her most important novel, Die Fassade (The Faade), came out in 1987 and
won that year the prestigious German Alfred-Dblin Award. It is about four
artists who are fancifully restoring the Renaissance palace of Litomysl, the
birthplace of the composer Bedrich Smetana and the site where Magdalena
Dobromila Rettigov, author of the first cookbook in Czech, had died. In the
lengthy sixth chapter of the first part, Monkov reconsiders the Czech
national awakening by putting her artist-restorers on stage to play some of its
leading figures: next to Smetana and Rettigov, we see the scientist Jan Evangelista Purkyne, who went to high school there, and the historian Alois Jirsek
(Kliems, Stummland 104108). The plays historical commentary mirrors the
playful and irreverent redecoration of the palace faade. Indeed, Monkovs
voluminous picaresque novel brims with humorous episodes and countless
learned puns and allusions. She calls the fictional castle actually Friedland
(Frydlant)-Litomysl to fuse the Czech tradition with the German one (Kafka
visited the castle in Friedland). The first part of the novel is titled Bhmische
Drfer (Bohemian Villages), not just to indicate the place of the action but because the German phrase also refers to things completely incomprehensible
and alien (=it is Chinese to me). The second part, titled Potemkin Villages, refers to the fake villages that Potemkin is said to have built to deceive
Empress Catherine. In the novel, it covers the hilarious adventures of the
Czech artists in Siberia: en route to an assignment in Japan, they get stuck in
native communities and in a Kafkaesque Soviet bureaucracy overseeing a
friendly scientific institution. The Soviet scientists are portrayed with sympathetic irony, but this, together with political allusions in the first part, made
the novel unpublishable in communist Czechoslovakia, though Monkov
was allowed to return for visits. She died prematurely in 1998.
The Polish Jews who were ejected from their academic jobs in the 1960s included Zygmunt Bauman and Jan Kott. Leszek Kolakowski, who took a revisionist and humanist approach to Marxism in the late 1950s and the 60s,
was forced to leave because he had been expelled from the Party and deprived
42
Chapter I
of his university chair. Kazimierz Brandys, Janusz Gowacki, Stanisaw Baranczak, and other Polish writers left when General Jaruzelski declared martial law in 1981. Adam Zagajewski left a year later, after he had received an official prohibition to publish because of his involvement in dissident activities.
Romanias Thaw in the 1960s, overrated in the West because of Ceausescus
relative independence from Moscow (for instance, by refusing to participate
in the joint invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968), came to an abrupt end after
Ceausescu visited North Korea, Vietnam, and Maos Chinese cultural revolution. In the so-called Theses of ( July) 1971 he reasserted strict Party control,
for instance by reestablishing an index of books and writers. As a result, the
trickle of Romanian exiles swelled in the 1970s, with some prominent dissident writers, though the government did everything to throttle the exodus.
The playwright and poet Gheorghe Astalos left in 1971 for Paris, where he became known for both his plays and his volumes of poetry in French. Dumitru Tepeneag, a founder in the mid-60s of a surrealist group called Aesthetic Onirism that had to disband in the wake of the 1971 Theses, became a
bold critic of Ceausescus regime at home and even on Radio Free Europe
(see Camelia Craciuns article below on Monica Lovinescu). Finally, his citizenship was revoked during a trip abroad in 1975, and he had to ask for
asylum in France. Virgil Tanase, another leader of the Oniric group and the
director of the National Theater of Iasi, published in 1976 his first novel at
Flammarion in Paris., The regime offered a passport for him and his wife, and
they took the opportunity. Paul Goma settled in Paris in 1977, after serious
confrontations with the government (see Marcel Cornis-Popes article
below). Petru Popescu escaped in 1977 to Los Angeles, where he became a
successful novelist and screenplay writer.
The Romanian exodus continued in the 1980s. The first major figure was
Ion Caraion, who asked in 1981 for asylum in Lausanne, after decades of
persecution at home. His first book of poetry was banned; he was charged in
1950 with trying to publish abroad, and was subsequently stripped of his civil
rights, deprived of his property, and given a life sentence of hard labor on the
Danube-Black Sea canal. Released in 1955, Caraion was rearrested in 1958,
sent to work in copper mines, and was freed in 1964 under a general amnesty.
He lived only five years in the West, isolated and mistrusted, before he died.
Dorin Tudoran went on a hunger strike in April 1985 when his application for
emigration was rejected; he stopped forty-two days later, when he was granted
a passport, partly due to protests from human-rights groups abroad (see
Camelia Craciuns article below on Monica Lovinescu). Nina Cassian and
Norman Manea, two Romanian Jewish writers, went to New York in 1985 and
1986 respectively.
43
Romanian exiles in the West were still in reach of Ceausescu and his secret
police. Monica Lovinescu was beaten in Paris by two agents on November 18,
1977, whereas Tanase and Goma were ordered to be murdered in 1982. The
attempt misfired when the Securitate officer charged with the task, Matei
Pavel Haiducu, revealed the matter to his French colleagues. The resultant
simulated kidnapping was worthy of a spy comedy, but but a good excuse for
French President Franois Mitterrand to cancel his planned trip to Bucharest.
Whether Ceausescu wanted to have the Hungarian Transylvanian writer Albert Wass also be murdered in the US, as the writer claimed, remains unclear.
All Romanian writers suffered under Ceausescus stricter ideological policies, but writers from the German and Hungarian minorities became additionally victims of his increasing nationalism. The Aktionsgruppe Banat of
young German (Swabian) writers was officially banned in 1975, but Rolf Bossert, Johann Lippet, Herta Mller, William Totok, Richard Wagner, and others
were allowed to leave Romania in the 1980s as undesirable minority dissidents. Mller (see Thomas Coopers article on her below) and Wagner, who
became highly successful writers in Germany, obsessively continued to return
to the world of their dying ethnic community, for which they had no sympathy, and to the terrors of totalitarianism (see Wagner Selbstdarstellung).
German society, their home as well as their place of exile, remained problematic for them, because their worldviews sharply differed from those dominant
in the German refugee organizations. Bossert committed suicide in 1986.
Last but not least, we have to mention here the very special case of the Serbian writer Danilo Kis, who moved in 1979 to Paris, mainly because of a campaign and a court case against him in Yugoslavia on charges of plagiarism.
Since he left by his own volition, under pressure but not vitally threatened,
and since he could return, he was not formally an exile, though it has been
claimed, with some justification, that his departure initiated the waves of exile
from ex-Yugoslavia a decade later.
Homecoming and New Forms of Exile after 1989

The conditions of exile radically changed when the East-Central European
countries became finally free of communist regimes and Soviet domination.
With the exception of ex-Yugoslavia, the region is sending today expatriates
rather than exiles into the world. All countries have started the difficult and
often painful task of readmitting their surviving exiles and of reintegrating
into their national literary canons the work of all who left. Jir Mucha, Jir
Grusa, and Pavel Tigrid temporarily or permanently returned to Prague and
44
Chapter I
accepted government and diplomatic posts; Adam Zagajewski, Sawomir

Mrozek, Czesaw Miosz, and others cautiously and slowly returned to Poland, while others started to shuttle between a Western abode and a new one
at home. For the Hungarian Sndor Mrai, who committed suicide in 1989,
the changeover came too late but the international success of his works that
started in the 1990s was nothing short of sensational. Yet the return of the
prodigal sons has often been painful, especially when movements to rehabilitate anti-communist writers who held fascist, right wing, or anti-Semitic
views (e.g., Albert Wass, Jzsef Nyro, Vintila Horia), came to clash with
democratic, socialist, or reform-communist worldviews.
Such reintegration problems were often related to the revival of nationalism and chauvinism that actually dismantled two federal states, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. The particularly violent civil wars in former Yugoslavia have sent many new dissidents into the world, for instance, Dubravka
Ugresic to Amsterdam, Slavenka Drakulic to Sweden (by marriage), Semezdin Mehmedinovic from Sarajevo to the US, and David Albahari to Canada.
Predrag Matvejevic, who chose, as he says, a midway between asylum and
exile, now teaches at Romes La Sapienza University. Many internal exiles and migrs were forced from one member state of the former federation
to another, now independent one.
Chauvinism, lack of a broad and receptive reading public, and anti-Semitism are prompting, once more, many writers to leave their home. Some settle
in other East-European countries, others emigrate to the West or split their
lives between home and abroad. Participation in two worlds has been made
possible by new modes of communication. New forms of displacement and
Diaspora often allow writers a marginal oppositional role at home. The very
division between domestic and diasporic literature has changed its character, and whether exile is still a relevant term under the new conditions is
open to question.
5. Sites of Exile Culture

Ejecting Greek citizens by ostracism was probably the earliest European
form of banishment, but a history of exile in Europe could arguably start with
the Roman practice, for Roman laws provided the model for judicial proceedings that led to banishment in the Middle Ages and even beyond. In republican Rome, the Senate voted about sending people into exile, but in the
Roman Empire autocratic Emperors or their secret arms decided on such
matter.
45
Unlike Ovid, twentieth-century East-Central European exiles seldom

settled in cultures they regarded as barbarian. As a rule, they were received by
countries more developed and richer than their homeland, and, consequently,
it is not always clear whether political, artistic, or economic factors were paramount in a persons departure. Motivations for leaving are not, however, the
main subject of the following section. Instead, we shall ask why writers went
to one cultural center rather than the other, and how they acclimatized to it
once they were there. Many writers moved, like nomads, from one center to
another, out of restlessness or because of job opportunities. Surveying the
most important sites of exile, we shall look not only at individual fortunes, but
also at the exile associations and institutions. We shall ask, what contacts, if
any, the exile groups from different nations had among each other, and we
shall give attention to the host cultures social and intellectual climate, its degree of hospitality, and its attitude towards the exiles. What traditional elective
affinities or enmities existed between the home and the host countries? How
did these define the trajectories of writers in exile? How restrictive was the
political, cultural, literary situation of their host country? What, if any, impact
did the exiles have on the cultural and educational institutions of their host
country? What was the general reaction to the exiles? Did the host countries
exploit the exiles for their own political agendas? Did the exile writers from
Warsaw, Prague, Belgrade, and Budapest interact among each other once they
arrived in Paris, London, or New York?
Most of these questions have no general answer, and need to be discussed
in terms of concrete historical, geographical, and political situations. Still, we
note that exiles (as well as migrs and expatriates) were seldom received with
open arms by the host countries, in spite of much humanitarian rhetoric. Although led by Karl Renners social-democratic government, Austria was
highly embarrassed by the Hungarians who fled there in 1919. Western European countries and the US were disturbingly reluctant to admit those who fled
Hitler in the 1930s, and they were hardly more generous when it came to settling Holocaust survivors after World War II or admitting exiles fleeing the
communist regimes during the Cold War. The great exception was in
195657, when in a wave of enthusiasm (propelled by a sense of guilt for not
having helped politically and militarily) most countries opened their doors to
the Hungarian refugees and helped many writers to start a new career. On a
smaller scale, special measures were also taken after the suppression of the
1968 Prague Spring.
Exiled writers had to overcome not only bureaucratic hurdles, but also
political and cultural ones, which were often even more difficult to surmount.
Leaving aside the obvious problems of general cultural adjustment, and those
46
Chapter I
directly related to writing, exiled writers from East-Central Europe often

found themselves out of tune with the political attitudes of the Western intelligentsia and the larger public. Refugees of Hitler in the later thirties had
trouble conveying their sense of impending disaster to their new neighbors,
especially overseas, whereas those who fled the communist regimes often felt
uncomfortable in the company of those French or Italian communists and
their fellow-travelers who dominated the cultural scene. Last but not least, exiled writers and intellectuals were courted and often pressured by the CIA and
other Western agencies to become informants. A number of writers, journals,
and associations were supported by the CIA, often without their knowing
since this was chanelled via the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a front organization for it (see Frances Stonor Saunders). Radio Free Europe, which
provided a source of income for untold number of writers, was financed almost exclusively with CIA money between 1949 and 1971 (see Borbndi).
A final word about our choice of cultural centers. For historical reasons we
were inclined to start with the three imperial centers of the previous centuries:
Istanbul, Vienna, and Moscow. This, however, proved to be impractical, for
they carried different weights and functions in the twentieth century. We shall
start with Istanbul, which used to be an important, although seldom justly
recognized, center of exiles. Viennas key moment as an exilic center was in
the years 19191922, when it served as a conduit for Hungarians fleeing rightwing terror. Moscow, in turn, became a highly problematic center for communist exiles who fled Hitler.
Istanbul
Recurrent invasions by the Huns, the Mongols, the Tatars, the Magyars, and
other nomadic tribes had destabilized East-Central Europe in the deeper past,
but the most recent and lasting mark on the region was left by the Ottoman
Empire, which ruled much of it, directly or indirectly, between the thirteenth
and the nineteenth century. The Ottoman wars and occupations led to vast
population displacements towards the north, i.e., present-day Hungary and
and even Slovakia, and towards the west, the Habsburg territories. However,
refugees often found Habsburg Austria, for religious as well as political reasons, no more desirable than the Ottoman Empire. The Hungarian and
Transylvanian princes, who frequently shifted their alliances between Vienna
and Istanbul, fled almost as frequently southward as westward. The greatest
Transylvanian prince, Gbor Bethlen, fled twice to Istanbul in the seventeenth century; Ferenc Rkczi and his followers found an eighteenth-cen-
47
tury refuge in Tekirda, near Istanbul; refugees of the 184849 Hungarian revolution found safe haven in Istanbul. Lajos Kossuth, Ferenc Pulszky, the
Polish military commander Henryk Dembinsky, and others moved subsequently to London and Paris, but Jzef Bem, the Polish hero and military
leader of the revolution, stayed in Istanbul and died there after converting to
the Muslim religion. Polonezky (or Adampol), in the Beykoz district of Istanbul, was established in 1842 by Prince Adam Czartoryski with the hope
that it would eventually become, next to Paris, a second center of exiled Poles.
He commissioned the Polish-Ukrainian writer Micha Czajkowski (Mykhailo
Chaikovsky, or Sadyk Pasha), an exile of the 183031 Polish insurrection, to
carry out a plan that never fully materialized but helped the Hungarian and
Polish exiles of the 184849 revolution to settle in Turkey.
We may add, though this falls beyond the limits set for this book, that several leading writers of the Bulgarian and Albanian national awakening lived
and published in Istanbul, and it was in that city, and in Ankara, that German
Jewish academic refugees (among them Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer)
found employment during World War II. The Hungarian writer George
(Gyrgy) Tbori was journalist in Istanbul for a year during the war.
Vienna
The second imperial metropolis, Vienna, played a different role in exile
politics. In the nineteenth century, it was a magnet for writers, musicians, journalists, and scholars, some of whom were exiles. The great Serbian linguist
and folklorist Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic, for instance, fled in 1813 from the
Serbian-Turkish wars to Vienna, and remained there for most of his life. Austria, eager to get the support of the Croats, Slovaks, Serbs, and Romanians in
fighting the 1848 Hungarian revolutionaries, also offered a haven to those
who had to flee the Hungarian insurgents. The leading Slovak poet Jan Kollr,
who lived all his professional life in Pest as a Lutheran minister but supported
the Slovak cause in 184849, fled from revolutionary Pest to Vienna and was
given a professorship for his anti-Hungarian stance. However, he died already
in 1851.
In the last decades of the nineteenth century and the prewar years of the
twentieth, there was a considerable influx to Vienna from the eastern provinces and from various parts of Russia. The first group included ethnic Germans from cities like Lemberg and Chernowitz, and regions like the Banat.
Since they simply moved from the margins of the Empire to its metropolitan
center, they should not be regarded as genuine exiles. The second category,
48
Chapter I
mainly Jews fleeing the pogroms in the Ukraine and Russia, were genuine exiles coming into rather that out of East-Central Europe. David Vogel, for instance, came from Satanov (Podolia) to Vienna, and wrote there in Hebrew
Married Life (first published in 192930, in Tel Aviv), which many regard as
Viennas first great city novel.
Austria ceased to be an imperial power in 1918, but Vienna became for the
rest of the century, often rather reluctantly, a major center and transit station
for exiles from East-Central Europe. The first wave of exiles that inundated
the city in 1919 consisted, as we noted already, of Hungarian writers and intellectuals who fled because they foresaw the atrocities and pogroms of a
coming White Terror.
These Hungarian exiles adhered to conflicting groups and factions. Bla
Kun and the other communist political leaders arrived in a special train enjoying diplomatic immunity. The Austrian social-democratic government arrested them, but it resisted the demand by Hungarys new government to
extradite them. The communist leaders were allowed to depart for Russia,
whereas the social democrats were permitted to settle in Austria. Most of the
writers, artists, and intellectuals crossed illegally and continued to live without
proper papers. Many of them, for instance Ervin Sink, lived in the flimsy barracks of Grinzing, which used to serve as a temporary hospital during the war
and were now inhabited by political refugees, Zionists, struggling artists, university students, indigents, rebellious predecessors of the beat generation,
self-appointed saints, philosophers, and messiahs a weird medley of rootless
humanity (Zsuffa 123). Others did better. Bla Balzs moved with his wife
into the Union Hotel and from there to Schloss Waisnix in nearby Reichenach
to avoid being seen and identified. The filmmaker Sndor (Alexander) Korda
moved into a luxurious hotel to impress those he was to deal with.
Lukcs and Korvin were ordered by Kun to stay in Hungary to rebuild the
Party. Korvin was soon caught and executed, and Lukcs retrospectively
thought that Kun just wanted to get rid of him. Lukcs himself was smuggled
out in September, disguised as a chauffeur of a foreign officer, with the help
of his wealthy father and Karl Mannheim. Balzs found Lukcs in Vienna
a most heartrending sight deadly pale, with sunken face, nervous and dejected. He carried a gun for fear he might get kidnapped, for he was accused
in Budapest of instigating murder on nine counts (Balzs, Napl 2:
35859).He was briefly detained in Vienna, but then released and kept under
surveillance. Fearing his extradition, his supporters published an appeal in the
November 12, 1919 issue of the Berliner Tageblatt, which was signed, among
others, by Richard Dehmel, Paul Ernst, Bruno Frank, Alfred Kerr, as well as
by Thomas and Heinrich Mann.
49
Balzs jumped on a boat with his wife Anna Hamvassy late November,
after the police found his diary in his abandoned home. He traveled with his
brothers passport, and with a fake moustache, eyelashes, and sideburns. Still
shaken, he noted in his diary: I had the hideous face of a Jewish-broker, with
a monocle on my nose. Sad, isnt it, that one can mask me like this? Perhaps
somewhat of an unmasking? If not of myself, of the species (Napl 2: 347;
see also va Forgcss article below). The shadowing of Lukcs frightened
Balzs so much that he avoided him, and this contributed to their gradual
alienation from each other. Indeed, Balzs now wanted to avoid politics altogether. Communism, he wrote in his diary, was his religion, not his politics.
From now on, he wanted to be only an artist though he had pangs of guilt
for avoiding his conspiratorial friends in need. The Communist Party rejected
his membership, but he continued to pay his dues (Napl 2: 354 f).
For Balzs, exile meant a crisis of his revolutionary and Hungarian identity.
He embraced the war in 1914 with unusual patriotic fervor, suggesting in a
Nyugat article that the war was holy and each wars ditch of blood served the
evolution of humanity (Prizs-e vagy Weimar? 200). He became an internationalist and an activist during the Hungarian Soviet Republic, whereas in
Vienna he started to experience a deep tension between his Hungarian and
Jewish ties, and sensing that he may become a wandering Jew he desperately
tried to construct for himself a composite identity:
I am not Hungarian, and instincts of race have no voice in me. However, I accompanied
them along the path of metempsychosis, and I attached myself to them wholeheartedly; I
assumed their language and clothes, I made mine and loved their cause (not that of the
Hungarian lords but of Hungarianness, that mystical and indefinable something that
glows in Adys songs and the kuruc tunes). I joined and loved Hungarian culture, concluded with it a pact of comradery, and I would have become just as good a soldier as
Bem, Damjanich, or Guyon of the [1848] revolution. They threw me out now, and this
hurts. [] However, this perhaps completes my fate: out here, I can love that Hungarianness more clearly, undisturbed, and in my own way. My home cannot be located
on a map. And if that is the case, so be it.
Conclusion: I am not an exile. [] I am not interested in their national-political life
(Nonsense! Not true, either. How it hurt when I read Bratislava over the port of Pozsony, and how glad I was when the Viennese paper wrote that this is not yet final.) I do
not look for their company: I am a wanderer, and a lonely, non-national foreigner (for
the Jew is not nationless either); but Hungarian strings are strung over the lyre of my
heart, and I relate in Hungarian songs what hurts. (Napl 2: 361)
Balzs adhered to this slightly maudlin self-image and self-pity to the very end
of his life, though he often tried to overcome his isolation, at times, for instance under Stalin, at a price. As he wrote in his last, perhaps most beautiful
autobiographical text: That I was excluded from one community without be-
50
Chapter I
longing to another, that in my early childhood I was an outsider for every denomination and every community as an isolated lonely individual this determined my conduct and my fate throughout my entire life (lmod ifjusg
86).
While Balzs continued to write Hungarian essays, fairy tales, and some
uneven poetry, he succeeded faster and better than most other Hungarian exiles in getting integrated into German culture, thanks to his social grace and
his excellent mastery of German. His early play, Hallos fiatalsg (Deadly
Youth; 1917) was panned in Nyugat, rejected by the Hungarian National Theater, and earlier also by some Viennese theaters, but was now staged on the
Neue Wiener Bhne by Balzs himself under the title Tdliche Jugend (February
1920). It showed a group of young people threatened by nihilism, centering
on a young pianist who cannot decide between her career and her love for a
composer and finally commits suicide. The play had popular and a limited
critical success, but Balzs realized that the young Viennese literati looked
down upon its trashy sensationalism: at home, the old officials hated me but
the young generation was on my side. Am I to experience this here the other
way round? (Napl 2: 389) Still, Balzs enjoyed the good money he earned
with his Viennese projects, which also included a book he wrote with the
Danish writer Karin Michaelis and a regular column of film criticism he
started late 1922 for the daily Der Tag (The Day). The reviews helped him to
develop his book Der sichtbare Mensch (The Visible Man; 1924), a pioneering
theoretical approach to silent films that established his international reputation and allowed him to move in 1926 to Berlin, the center of interwar German film culture. The very title indicates that Balzs treasured film as a
medium that was able to reveal thoughts and feelings by means of faces,
movements, and, above all, gestures. Images, he thought, disclosed the invisible better than words in literature. For this reason, Balzs highly valued
close-ups, and he assigned a central role to the camera operator. Though Balzs used Eisensteins Potemkin in a Berlin lecture to illustrate this, Eisenstein
himself took issue with his view, arguing that montage and cutting were more
important. Several aspects of Balzss film aesthetics did not satisfy communist ideologues, who believed that material reality and class struggle determined psychology, and regarded the attention to close-ups and cameraman
with suspicion, for they foregrounded subjective (at times deliberately distorted) visions of things, people, and events. For the same reason they were
suspicious of Balzss interest in dreams and visions. Though he repeatedly
rejected the capitalist film industry and affirmed his belief in a coming new
society, his deviations from the dogmatic Party line got him into trouble,
time and again.
51
That Balzs rapidly became a star screenplay writer in Berlin, was due not
only to his book and to his newspaper articles but also to the personal ties he
cultivated already in Vienna with German authors and Hungarian filmmakers. He befriended in Vienna Leonhard Frank, Robert Musil (who enthusiastically greeted Balzss film aesthetics), Arthur Schnitzler, the actress
Helene Weigel (later Bertolt Brechts wife), and the composer Hanns Eisler;
he was a habitu of Caf Filmhof, where the migr Hungarian filmmakers of
great future fame gathered, among them Alexander Korda, who had already
seventeen Hungarian films to his name, Lajos Br, Kordas famous future
screenplay writer, and Mihly Kertsz, who already had made thirty-seven
films in Hungary and became world famous as Michael Curtiz, the director of
Casablanca and other film classics. Korda, Kertsz, and the screenplay-writer
Lszl Vajda had been the directors of the nationalized film industry during
the Hungarian Soviet Republic (Zsuffa 82). Korda was briefly arrested after
its collapse and he departed for Vienna in the fall of 1919. Most of these film
specialists had leftist orientations, but they were no card-carrying communists.
Strict communists like Rvai and Lukcs thought that the film people were
bad company for Balzs. Indeed, the communists looked with suspicion at
Balzss successes in the bourgeois-capitalist world of Vienna and Germany.
Lukcs had a low opinion of Balzss recent literary works, and thought that
his former friend was wasting his talent, which he gradually came to regard as
thin anyway. Things got worse when Lukcs disapproved of Balzss promiscuity and did not support his application for Party membership, remarking
that his former friend could never commit himself totally, even though he repeatedly confirmed his communist convictions and participated in Party activities.
Nevertheless, when Lukcss Sunday Circle reassembled early 1921 in the
Vienna atelier of the sculptor Bni Ferenczy (Congdon, Exile 52), Balzs became once more an active member, together with Lukcs, Rvai, Yelena Grabenko (Lukcss first wife), the philosopher Bla Fogarasi, and the writer
Anna Lesznai (who had just divorced Jszi). They were joined later by the art
historian Charles de Tolnay, the economist Lszl Radvnyi (the future husband of Anna Seghers), and the writers Andor Gbor and Ervin Sink. The
Austrian writer Maria Lazar and Hanns Eisler also attended occasionally
(Zsuffa 420). The central issue was to reexamine the communist revolution
and their participation in it. Lukcs was of the opinion that surrendering their
individual ethics by merging it into a common ideology was a positive achievement, Lesznai and others disagreed (Kardy 603), while Sink regarded such a
surrender of the self as a modern-day unio mystica with god. Embracing an
52
Chapter I
ideology, the masses, or an impersonal unity, revealed a weakness and issued

from of a desire to suppress the self (Kardy 605).
The sociologist and philosopher Karl (Kroly) Mannheim had to go into
exile, for Lukcs had appointed him professor during the communist regime.
After staying briefly in a refugee camp near Vienna, he left early 1920 for Freiburg, where he joined Wilhelm (Vilmos) Szilasi, an earlier member of the Sunday Circle, who was also professor during the Commune and later became
Heideggers successor. In Freiburg, Mannheim wrote his unpublished one-act
tragedy The Lady from Biarritz (Congdon, Exile 266) before embarking on
the sociological projects that were to bring him world fame.
Sink fled to Vienna in September 1919, went into hiding next year
in Szabadka (by then Subotica), but was discovered in 1921 and interned
to Austria (like the Serbian writer Milo Dor before him). Back in Vienna,
he underwent a crisis of conscience: he published a poetry volume titled
Fjdalmas isten (Suffering God; 1923) and a journal called Testvr (Brother;
192426), both of which attempted to fuse Christian and communist Messianism. His programmatic preface of Testvr which published works by
such illustrious writers as Balzs, Lesznai, Gide, and Martin Buber defined, however, the journal as a literary publication whose natural first
task was beauty:
Testvr does not intend to be liberal in the sense of offering space to all valuable literature; neither does it want to turn, ungenerously, dogmas into obligatory programs.
Instead, it wants to offer a gathering place for those who do not belong to any of
the post-Nyugat urban [polgri] literary groups because their art does not lead through
politics (1.1 [1924]: 6)
Sinks income from publications in the journals Korunk (Cluj), Nyugat,

and Szzadunk was so meager that his wife, Irma Rothbart, had to support
them. She also turned temporarily to Christian ideas, wrote a letter about
it to Lukcs, and quit the Party on June 19, 1920. After several years in
Vienna, the couple returned to Yugoslavia, where Sink wrote between 1931
and 1934 his voluminous roman clef, the Optimistk (The Optimists), his fictional rendering of the revolutions of 191819, to which we shall return
below
Gbors trajectory ran the opposite direction. Having started as a brilliant
young a-political cabaretist and translator, he participated in the reorganization of the theaters during the communist revolution without joining the
Party. A brief arrest during the White Terror turned him into a communist
(Sink, regny 415). Upon his release, he provided humanitarian help to those
still in jail, and this endangered him so much that he finally had to flee from
Hungary in 1920. In Vienna, Gbor became the leading voice of the radically
53
engaged communists. He wrote for the Bcsi Magyar jsg (Viennese Hungarian Daily), attacking the Hungarian government as well as the bourgeois-liberal orientation of the paper. In s itt jn Jszi Oszkr (And here comes Oscar
Jszi; 1922) Gbor even attacked Jszi, who assumed the editorship of the
paper in June 1921. He also published several volumes of poetry that attempted to put Party ideology into verse (for which Sink criticized him: regny 41617). He became so radical that he was finally expelled from Austria at
the request of the Hungarian government, and subsequently also from
France. He settled for a few years in Berlin.
The Hungarian communists of Vienna were torn between two factions.
Bla Kun left for the Soviet Union in August 1920, but he wanted to keep the
Hungarian Communist Party under his control from Moscow. This led to a
clash in 1921 with Jeno Landler, leader of the Hungarian communists in
Vienna, who preferred to work through the Hungarian trade unions and the
Social Democratic Party instead of the isolated and powerless communists in
Hungary. Most of the Hungarians in Vienna, including Lukcs and Balzs,
disliked Kun and supported Landler. However, he died in 1928.
Divided or not, the Viennese Hungarian communists furiously opposed
two of their former allies, the radical democrats, whose main representative
was Jszi, and the Activists, led by Lajos Kassk and his journal Ma. The latter
group included Sndor Barta, Erzsi jvri (Kassks sister and Bartas wife),
Jnos Mcza, and, for a limited period, Lszl Moholy-Nagy. Concerning the
Activists, suffice to add to va Forgcss article below one of Balzss vituperative diary entries, recorded after a conversation with Kassk in the editorial
office of the Bcsi Magyar jsg. Balzs found Kassk ghastly (kisrtetiesen) stupid: he had an uncultured brain and was as stubborn as the insane. He
proudly claimed he would not go after books, would not quote, and would
not think with the brain of others. Balzs thought he followed watereddown slogans from sayings found in old and worthless books, words that
were in the air. Revolution for the revolution! For revolution is life. Production of new ideas and art. And: the artist is the most developed human
being. I get sick of these stupid banalities Balzs added (Napl 2: 437). The
Ma people seemed to him reprehensible for constituting an association art,
a spiritual share company. Balzss old superciliousness and his haughty
spiritual aristocratism would get the upper hand in facing Kassk (Napl 2:
438), but actually he was, just as Kassk, deeply entangled in the dialectics of
proletarian art.
Many of those who fled Hungary in 191920 held progressive or even radical political views, but were not communists and were only slightly or not at
all involved the Commune. Being mostly of Jewish descent, they feared po-
54
Chapter I
groms during the coming White Terror, and they left Hungary as migrs and
expatriates, not yet suspecting that their departure would be permanent. The
most prominent among them, Oszkr Jszi, had left for Vienna already on
May 1, 1919, soon after the fall of Mihly Krolyis socialist regime. He continued to argue for land distribution and a non-violent social system, which
brought him in conflict with Lukcs (who disliked him already at home) and,
as we noted, Andor Gbor. Under the editorship of Jszi, the Bcsi Magyar
jsg gained further importance, though this bourgeois newspaper, the most
important publishing organ of the Hungarian exiles and migrs, survived
only until December 16, 1923. It reported on politics, the arts, sports, the
stock market, and even about Viennas social world. More importantly, it
regularly reported on the White Terror and the trials of communists in Hungary, but in such a manner that it could legally be registered and distributed in
Hungary. The brothers Michael and Karl Polnyi were engaged in its publication, as well as Andor Nmeth, a fine writer and translator, who spent the
war in a French camp for foreigners and subsequently became the press representative of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in Vienna. Nmeth advocated
Kassk and the avant-garde in the Bcsi Magyar jsg, and he published with
Kassk the experimental journal 22, which, however did not get beyond the
first issue. The contributors of the Bcsi Magyar jsg came from the whole
political spectrum of the Hungarian exiles save Rvai, Lukcs, and other communists in the underground. They included Balzs, Kassk, Mihly Krolyi,
and the journalist Gyrgy Blni, who assumed prominent communist positions in Hungary later in the century.
Departure from Vienna was gradual. The popular writer Lajos Zilahy returned to Hungary as early as 1919, Kassk and Nmeth in 1926, and Anna
Lesznai in 1930. Szilasi and Mannheim went, as we saw, to Freiburg. Jszi left
for a US lecture tour in 1924, and accepted the following year a professorship
at Oberlin College, Ohio. By then it became obvious that his ideas on Hungary and the Danube Federation could not be carried out in the near future.
The largest group of Vienna exiles drifted over to Berlin during the 1920s.
Lukcs was expelled from Vienna in 1930.
Gyula ( Julius) Hy, who just started a promising theater career in Berlin in
1932 (see below), fled to Vienna when Hitler came to power, but was jailed
there for six months for his involvement in Viennas short civil war of 1934.
In the second half of the 1930s, writers increasingly fled from rather than to
Vienna. dn von Horvth, for instance, the brilliant Fiume/Rijeka-born
dramatist, escaped from Vienna to Budapest when Nazi Germany annexed
Austria. From Budapest he went to Paris, but before he could flee further a
falling tree branch killed him on the Champs lyses.
55
Vienna became once more a stepping-stone and an uncertain haven for

East-Central European refugees and exiles during the Cold War, especially
after the Austrian State Treaty reestablished its full independence in 1955.
Soon afterwards, it received the Hungarian refugees of the 1956 uprising,
quite a few of whom became permanent residents in Austria. The city remained a refuge during the following decades. For instance, in 1978 it hosted
the Czech Pavel Kohout, a former communist and a co-founder of Charta 77,
as a resident of the Burgtheater. At the end of his stay, Kohout was prevented
from returning home and deprived of his Czechoslovak citizenship and remained in the city.
Berlin: Intermezzo in the 1920s

When the Viennese Hungarian exiles and migrs migrated in the 1920s to
Berlin, they met there a whole colony of Hungarian expatriates who had left
the country legally and worked in the theater, the art world, the film industry,
publishing, or some other cultural institution of the Weimar Republic.
The first to leave Vienna for Berlin, was Lszl Moholy-Nagy, who had no
role in the Commune and left Hungary to develop as an artist. He soon recognized that Berlin, rather than Vienna, was the place to go, and he found
there what he needed, including such friends as the portrait painter Lajos Tihanyi, the constructivist sculptor Lszl Pri (who had an exhibition with him
in 1922), and the art critic Erno Kllai (see va Forgcss article below), who
left Hungary legally in 1920. When Moholy-Nagy briefly became the Berlin
representative of Ma, the journal devoted much of its September 15, 1921
issue to his work, and Kllai provided the lead article on him (Congdon, Exile
151 f).
Alexander Korda established himself in the film metropolis Berlin in 1923.
He gradually brought over several other Hungarians, including Balzs, who
arrived in May 1926, by now as the internationally acknowledged author of
Der sichtbare Mensch. Balzs became the scenarist for Kordas Madame wnscht
keine Kinder (Madame Doesnt Want Children; 1926), and he subsequently
wrote the scenario for the now lost film Die Abenteuer eines Zehnmarkscheines
(The Adventures of a Ten-Mark Note; 1926), which featured a banknote as
the protagonist. Balzs criticized the capitalist film industry so vehemently
that the UFA, the biggest German film company, became reluctant to work
with him. In the next years, Balzs made two important contributions to film
making. He rewrote the scenario of The Threepenny Opera when the author Bertolt Brecht and the director G[eorg] W[ilhelm] Pabst could not resolve their
56
Chapter I
differences (Zsuffa 18487), and he helped Leni Riefenstahl, then still an unknown actress, to film Das blaue Licht (The Blue Light; 1932) for which she
never paid him, and did not even give him credit as soon as Hitler assumed
power.
Balzs published in 1930 his book on sound films, Der Geist des Films (The
Spirit of Film), and the novel Unmgliche Menschen (Impossible People), whose
first chapter already appeared earlier in the Nyugat. The novel portrayed how
isolated Hungarian intellectuals and artists gradually engage with peasants
and workers in revolutionary activities a trajectory Balzs personally attempted to follow in Berlin by immersing himself in leftist and communist
educational and theater projects. After working in Erwin Piscators theater, he
became the artistic director of the communist Arbeiter-Theater Bund Deutschlands (German Workers Theater Alliance), staging agitprop performances
until his dismissal. He participated also in the Marxistische Arbeiterschule
(MASCH), which the mentioned economist Lszl Radvnyi, by now husband of Anna Seghers, started in 1925. Open to all for a modest fee, MASCH
was committed to the Marxist-Leninist doctrine and propagated whatever the
KPD political line happened to be. Its Communist outlook notwithstanding,
the school embodied, according to Radvnyi, the spirit of the Sunday Circle
and the Free School of the Humanistic Sciences (Congdon, Exile 84).
MASCH involved Lukcs and his wife (under the name of Hans & Anna
Keller), Fogarasi, Gbor, and Balzs; Alfred Einstein, Egon Erwin Kisch,
Ludwig Renn, Erwin Piscator, John Heartfield, Hanns Eisler, Walter Gropius,
Bruno Taut, and Alfred Kurella were among the German lecturers.
One of the new faces at MASCH was the young Hy, who, as we noted,
went legally to Dresden to study architecture and then stage design (Geboren
87 f). He returned home in 1923 to try his hand at married life, but departed
again in 1929, this time for Berlin. He applied for membership in the Communist Party of Germany; in MASCH he and performed various minor jobs
because Piscator gave the lectures on theater (Geboren 105106, 114 ff). By
1931, Hy had finished three plays and struck gold, for S. Fischer, a leading
publisher, offered him a contract (Geboren 10710), and managed to place
Hys first play within two weeks at Max Reinhardts Deutsches Theater.
Hys most ambitious early play, Sigismund, was premiered in Breslau, and
then staged under the title Gott, Kaiser, Bauer (God, Emperor, Peasant) on December 23, 1932, also in the Deutsches Theater, and with the best German actors. It dramatized Emperor Sigismunds failed attempt at the Council of
Konstanz to form an alliance with the Czech religious reformer Jan Hus,
against a Church that was torn by rival claims to the papacy. Sigismund and his
wife Barbara visit the imprisoned Hus. She is deeply impressed by the humane
57
love that emanates from Huss writings, but gets confused when Hus reveals
in the conversation a violent revolutionary commitment to the poor and refuses to cooperate with the Emperor. Whether historically accurate or not,
Huss words on stage offered a radical (and questionable) answer to the dilemma that tormented Lukcs, Balzs, Sink, and the other Hungarian communist revolutionaries of 1919: A love of mankind that shies away from
shedding blood for the benefit of mankind has nothing to do with mankind or
love. It is idle talk (Gott 55). As far as Emperor Sigismunds proposed pact
with the heretic is concerned, Hus maintains that (a clearly Marxian conception of) class struggle makes it impossible: Emperor and Peasant cannot revolt jointly (Gott 61). Herbert Ihering praised the play highly, but Alfred
Kerr, the other leading Berlin theater critic, made fun of it, and the review in
the official Nazi paper Angriff, probably written by Goebbels himself, accused
Hy of distorting the history of the German People, admitting ironically that
Hay understands how to deprive people of their illusions (Hay, Geboren 113).
Due to organized Nazi disturbances, the performances had to be terminated
as of December 29, and Hy had to flee from Hitlers Berlin to Vienna within
a few months.
Gbor arrived in Berlin in 1925, after he had been expelled from Austria as
well as France. He became active in the German Communist Party and its official newspaper, the Rote Fahne, whose chief cultural critic was Alfrd Kemny, a former associate and later opponent of Moholy-Nagy. Gbor became
in 1927 a Berlin correspondent of the Soviet newspaper Pravda, and in 1929
an Editorial Board member of the newly-founded Linkskurve, a journal of the
Bund proletarisch-revolutionrer Schriftsteller (International Alliance of Revolutionary Writers) that was financed by Moscow and led by the poet Johannes
R. Becher. With the zeal of converts, the erstwhile bourgeois cabaretist, Gbor
demanded in the Linkskurve a proletarian literature written by workers that
would overcome the whole bourgeois-capitalist literary tradition. His position reminiscent of the Proletcult movement that flourished after the Soviet
revolution but became outdated by 1929 was labeled left-sectarian, and
Gbor was dropped from the Editorial Board upon instructions from Moscow which were delivered to him by his fellow Hungarian exile, Bla Ills
(Congdon, Exile 8687). As we shall see, Gbors friction with the Germans
continued in Moscow.
For about ten years, then, Berlin seems to have been teeming with Hungarian exiles, migrs, and expatriates. But where were the other East-European
writers, artists, and intellectuals? Berlin was, of course, a favored city of the
Russian migrs, and some of the literati, for instance Shklovski, stayed there
before returning to the Soviet Union. We also know that the Bulgarian Georgi
58
Chapter I
Dimitrov was there and then accused of the fire that burned down the Reichstag. However, very few writers and intellectuals came in those years to Berlin
from the other East European countries. The Czechs and Slovaks, as well as
the Poles, seem to have enjoyed their newly won independence and stayed at
home, while the Romanians all went to Paris. To be sure, Romania, as well as
Yugoslavia and the Slovak part of Czechoslovakia were represented in Berlin
by their Hungarian minorities.
Moscow: Exile under Stalin

The city did not admit exiles in the nineteenth century, only a considerable
number of dissident Baltic and Bulgarian students, several of whom became
leaders of their national liberation movements. Moscow, even more than
Vienna, was a power center that sent people from various parts of the empire
into exile, usually Siberia. The most important nineteenth-century East-Central European writer banished by Russia was the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz. Born on an estate in what is now Belarus, he participated as a student at
Vilnius University in the Filomaci Society of young students and intellectuals,
which advocated independence from Russia. The Filomaci were put on trial in
1823, but Mickiewicz was sentenced, unlike some of his friends, to banishment in Russia rather than imprisonment. When he was allowed to quit his
strange exile in 1829, he left Russia for good and remained in West-European
exile to the very end of his life. Two other Poles should be mentioned in this
context: the playwright and translator Apollo Korzeniowski, who was sent in
1861 into Russian exile with his son, the future Joseph Conrad, for preparing
the 186364 Polish uprising, and the paternal grandfather of the composer
Dmitri Shostakovich, who was sent in 1866 to Narim, near Tomsk, for participating in the same uprising. Conrad and Shostakovich were, thus, descendants of Poles sent into Russian exile.
World War I and its aftermath set in motion waves of forced displacements
from East to West. The first group consisted of captive soldiers of the Central
Powers, who had been indoctrinated with communist ideology in POW
camps and released to spread the revolutionary fire to their homelands in
Central Europe. This group included not only politicians like the Hungarian
Bla Kun but also writers like the Czech Jaroslav Hasek or the Hungarian
Frigyes Kariks, who became the Hungarian translator of Haseks Svejk in
Paris. Russian emigrants fleeing the turmoil and the emerging communist system constituted an even larger group that included, for instance, Vladimir
Nabokov.
59
The subject of the following pages will be another group of exiles, one that
followed a trajectory from West to East, hoping to find a shelter in Stalins
Moscow. As seat of the Comintern (Stalins international communist organization), Moscow offered a haven to exiled communist leaders such as the
Bulgarian Georgi Dimitrov (as of 1935 General Secretary of the Comintern),
the French Maurice Thorez, the Italian Palmiro Togliatti, and, of course, the
Hungarian Kun. The range of communist writers who fled to Moscow was
considerably narrower: next to Hungarians and Germans there were, as we
saw, some Polish writers, but apparently none from Czechoslovakia, Romania, or Yugoslavia. Several writers from the latter countries visited the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 30s but found it, like Andr Gide in 1935, not
quite to their taste. The Croatian writer Miroslav Krleza came to the Soviet
Union in 1925, but the Moscow chapter of his Izlet u Rusiju (An Excursion to
Russia) recalls mostly his own childhood memories instead of giving an impression of the city and its people. His experience of Soviet society weakened
his communist belief and he never considered settling in the country. The Romanian Panat Istrati, who roamed around Europe and the Mediterranean as
an expatriate, wanted to settle in the Soviet Union but became disillusioned
during his visit in 192728. He returned in 1930 to Romania and joined the
right-wing movement for the last five years of his life. Antoni Sonimski also
visited the Soviet Union in 1932. His account, Moja podrz do Rosji, was not
hostile, just honest, open, and self-questioning, but this was enough to alienate his communist and fellow-traveler friends, and gave him such a reputation
in the Soviet Union that he wisely avoided fleeing there in 1939.
Marci Shore has recently studied in Caviar and Ashes (2006) the fate of a
Polish generation gravitating towards Moscow. Most of the poets came from
the avant-garde (especially from Polish Futurism), and came to a tragic end in
the Soviet Union. The first to leave Poland was Witold Wandurski, who coauthored with Stanisaw Ryszard Stande and Wadysaw Broniewski Trzy salwy
(Three Salvos; 1925), a volume of Polish revolutionary-proletarian poetry.
Jailed in Poland in 1928, he went to Kiev upon his release in 1929 to work with
a Polish theater. He was arrested in 1933, forced to confess to having worked
with Polish fascists, condemned to death, and executed in 1934. Bruno Jasienski was celebrated in the Soviet Union after he was evicted from France in
1929, though Stande and several other Polish writers questioned the story of
his persecution in Poland. Jasienski replied with a vicious attack on his onetime comrades (Shore 9397) and quickly rose to eminence in the Soviet
Union. He edited the Polish-language monthly Kultura Mas (The Culture of
the Masses) but resigned when he was accused of nationalist deviation, and
started to play a leading role in Soviet literary politics. He published in 1931 a
60
Chapter I
satirical play in Russian and linked up with the Hungarian writer Antal Hidas
(Bla Kuns son-in-law) in taking on, with Stalins help, the editors of Pravda
(Shore 106107). He played a key role in the famous first All-Union Writers
Congress of 1934 and the Sovietization of Tadzhikistan. However, by 1937 he
was fighting for his life against accusations of spying and he lost: he confessed, recanted, and was finally shot in prison on September 17, 1938 (Shore
14149). Stande, Jasienskis former comrade, fled the Polish police in 1931
but and met with a similar fate in the Soviet Union: he was arrested in 1937
and murdered sometime in 1939. Indeed, all leaders of the Polish Communist
Party (KPP) were executed in the Soviet Union in the late 1930s, except for
one that sat in a Polish prison; the Party was dissolved by the Comintern in
1938. As mentioned, the Polish writers that fled later from Poland eastwards
in 1939 survived, but, with the exception of Wasilewska, they saw only the
inner walls of prison cells in Moscow.
Hidas, who was also condemned in 1938 but survived (unlike his father-inlaw), seems to have been the only Hungarian exile writer who had contact
with Polish writers of Moscow. This may not be surprising, if we consider that
in spite of traditional bonds between Poles and Hungarians the two groups
had different standings and compositions in the Eastern exile. For instance,
many Polish writers fought in one of the two anti-Nazi Polish armies, whereas
Bla Ills was the only Hungarian who actually fought as an officer (born
in Ruthenia, he was considered a Ukrainian). The Hungarian contingent of
writers, intellectuals, and artists, was the largest and most important one from
East-Central Europe, because, of the exodus in 1919. We also saw that quite a
few of these went to Berlin in the 1920s, and had to flee again when Hitler
came to power. Some did come directly to Moscow from Hungary: the literary historian Erno Czbel, for instance, was imprisoned in Hungary and came
to Moscow after his release in 1922, together with his wife, the poet and translator Sarolta Lnyi. They may have been the first Hungarian writers arriving
there. Others followed. Bla Ills, who fled from Hungary in 1919 and was expelled from Czechoslovakia as well as Vienna, arrived in Moscow in 1923.
The couple Sndor Barta and Erzsbet jvri broke with Kassk and moved
from Vienna to Moscow in 1925. The painter Bla Uitz, originally also in the
Kassk group, came in 1926 from France.
Lukcs came to Moscow when was expelled from Austria in 1930. He
started to work in the Marx-Engels Archives with Mikhail Lifshitz, but was
sent to Berlin by the Comintern in the summer of 1931. He was expelled from
Germany when Hitler came to power in 1933 and returned to Moscow via
Czechoslovakia. Other key Hungarian exiles also came from Berlin to Moscow. Balzs arrived in 1931 upon an invitation from Mezhrabpom-film to
61
help with the film adaptation of Bla Illss popular novel g a Tisza (The
Tisza [River] Burns). Gbor fled from Berlin in 1933. As we saw, Hy escaped
from Berlin to Vienna, where he was arrested for a few months. He came
from Switzerland to Moscow in 1935, as guest of the International Union of
Revolutionary Theater, a Moscow-based organization founded in 1934 and
led then by Piscator. Hy was on good terms with a number of other exiled
German writers and intellectuals, including Bertolt Brecht and Friedrich
Wolf, though not with Johannes R. Becher (Geboren 16869), who later became Minister of Culture in the GDR. Hy rather liked father Wilhelm
Pieck, later President of the GDR, but he sneered at the other exiled German
politicians, who led a petit bourgeois rather than revolutionary life in Moscow.
He reserved his nastiest remarks for Walter Ulbricht, who was still in full
power in the GDR when Hy published in West Germany his memoirs
(1971).
Ervin Sink was a special case. After finishing his autobiographical fiction
Optimistk, he moved from Yugoslavia to Vienna and then to Paris in search
of a publisher. After many refusals he was invited through Romain Rollands
mediation to Moscow, where, so he thought, his manuscript would surely find
a publisher. Upon their arrival in May 1935, Sink and his wife were put up in
one of Moscows best hotel and provided with great food and service. However, as soon as the first reader reported that the manuscript exuded a
counter-revolutionary spirit (regny 151), the Sinks were thrown out of the
hotel. The manuscript received subsequently high praise from Kun, now
member of the Executive Committee of the Comintern, from Alfred Kurella,
a leading German exile, and from Gbor (regny 15051, 31720, and 42627),
but the publication promises were consistently rereneged by timid bureaucrats who shied away from controversial decisions in a world dominated by
fear. Instead of revolutionaries and heroes Sink found in Moscow only functionaries who atrociously played the eternal egg-dance of the immortal Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (regny 111). The story repeated itself with plans
for a German translation of the novel, with publishing a chapter of it in Littrature international, and with Sinks various film projects. By the end of his
stay, his powerful patron Kun became a liability. As to German contacts,
Sink shocked the Arbeitsgemeinschaft deutscher Schriftsteller by arguing in a discussion that Nietzsche was no proto-fascist (regny 96100). The Sinks were
expelled from the Soviet Union on April 14, 1937, allegedly because they had
no income. His patron Kun was condemned in the Moscow trials in the spring
of 1937 and died two years later.
62
Chapter I
Publishing in Moscow
Exiled writers in Moscow had to overcome two major obstacles to survive:
the scarcity of means and the political purges. In the 1920s, none of the two
was yet life threatening. The Soviet government adopted an internationalist
outlook because it wanted to foment revolutions worldwide. It established,
next to the Comintern, a number of Moscow-based international cultural associations that were generously provided with funds to publish books and
journals, as well as to invite prominent foreigners from the literary, theater,
and film worlds. However, Stalin shifted from an internationalist to a
nationalist policy by the mid-1930s. Publishing in German, English, or
French was for a while still quite easy, but publishing books and journals in
Hungarian was extremely rare: Illss g a Tisza (1929) and Lengyels Visegrdi
utca (1932), both histories of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, were probably
published with the support of Kun, who added prefaces to them. Balzs published a volume with two dramas and two thin poetry volumes in the 1940s,
while Lukcs put out only the essay collection rstudk felelossge (Responsibility of the Clerks; 1944).
Hungarians seeking a wider readership had to publish in Russian or German. Several books of Lukcs and Balzs were, indeed, translated and published in Russian. Lukcs put out a book on Marxism and nineteenth-century
literary theory (1937), and one on the history of Realism (1939), which occasioned severe attacks on him. He actually did not master Russian, but as editor
of the journal Literaturnyi Kritik he could easily find translators for his Russian
books and articles. Balzs published a number of books, including some
based on film scripts, and several very successful books for young people.
The bulk of the books written by Hungarian exiles appeared in German,
since it was a second mother tongue for most of them. Curiously, Lukcs did
not publish a single book in German during his Moscow exile. With the exception of the two mentioned books in Russian, his enormous output in those
years appeared exclusively in article form. Some of them, for instance his
study of the historical novel, he republished after the war as books. Balzs,
Gbor, and Hy did publish books in German. In the case of Balzs, these
were mostly based on his film scripts. Gbor published several translations, as
well as short stories, which, as we shall see, occasioned a disturbing polemic.
As to Hy, he published in 1938 his new play Haben (Have), which Lion
Feuchtwanger praised in the preface as the first genuine socialist play, steeped
in Marxism from within. Reading the play today, one tends to agree, however,
with Brecht, who contested the praise (Hay, Geboren 21519). Based on a true
story, the play portrays how women in the Hungarian hamlet Tiszazug (which
gave the Hungarian title to the play) married and then poisoned smallholders
63
to acquire their land. Not much of Marxism here. Hys Gott, Kaiser, Bauer was
republished in Moscow, but neither of his plays made it to Russian stages.
Moscows only literary journal in Hungarian, the j Hang, appeared between January 1938 and June 1941. The first issue named Sndor Barta as Editor-in-Chief, and listed Balzs, Blni, Gbor, Lukcs, Zoltn Fbry, and Sndor Gergely among its main contributors. Barta, a top functionary of the
mentioned the International Alliance of Revolutionary Writers, was, however,
soon arrested, and Gbor became the Editor-in-Chief. The change was discreetly passed over by naming in the masthead of the remaining issues only an
unspecified Board. Further arrestations could this way be kept secret.
Many of j Hangs contributions were of high quality, in spite of their ideological conformity. The journal could rightly claim in 1939 that it was the
only political and literary monthly published beyond Hungarys borders,
though it was surely not the most outstanding literary journal of the Hungarian emigrants after 1919, as Endre Ills has claimed in a Hungarian study of
1977 (335). Lukcss articles on Realism, on Balzac, on aesthetics, and on
other topics became classics in the postwar decades. Rvai, the ideological arbiter of j Hang, mistakenly diagnosed a decline of the populists (npiesek) and
of the Hungarian Arrow-Cross (Nyilas) Party, but he published selections of
his important study on Endre Ady, which appeared in book form after the
war. Furthermore, j Vilg printed four of Hys plays in Hungarian, and it
published a regular column on Hungarian agriculture by Imre Nagy, the future Prime Minister during the 1956 revolution. Sndor Gergely, President of
the Hungarian Writers Association after the war, published excerpts from his
work on Dzsa Gyrgy, leader of the great peasant uprising in 1514. Balzs
prepared a screenplay from it after the war, but Gergely disliked it and the
project fell through (Zsuffa 360).
There were, of course, many all too tendentious pieces in j Hang, and the
omitted topics tell us as much as what was included. As time went on, more
and more articles dealt with Soviet literature, while the texts on and by Western authors became rare and predictably biased. The Hungarian populists
Gyula Illys, Zsigmond Mricz, and Gza Fja were criticized, though only
mildly, for the communists preferred the rural writers to the urban bourgeois
ones. j Hang reprinted without any commentary a translation of Molotovs
speech on the 1939 Soviet-German Pact, and it devoted its December issue to
Stalins sixtieth birthday. To celebrate such anniversaries was obligatory, but
within a narrow range writers could choose their mode of adulation. Lukcs
wrote on Stalins books in the capitalist countries, and on his view of the
nationalities issue, whereas Balzs devoted to the occasion a poem with the
following opening: No human being has ever carried such burdens / treas-
64
Chapter I
ures of a vast heritage weigh you down / the bridge of humanity is on your
shoulder, / the road to the future over a dark chasm; // No human heart was
ever more heavy (3). Was Balzs obliged to write this, as Zsuffa believes? The
ideologically much more committed Sndor Barta wrote a comparable poem
for the occasion, yet he soon disappeared in the purges. Could Balzs, who
was more sophisticated and reflective than Barta, write such words with full
conviction? Unlikely. Rather, I tend to believe, such repeated failures of sensibility were attempts to compensate for his well-known ideological weaknesses: his formalism, his psychologism, his affinity with the bourgeois
glamour of the film world, and his penchant for a comfortable life amidst
poverty.
Similarly disturbing is an open letter that Balzs sent in the April 1938 issue
of j Hang to the Bla Bartk, whom he had sometimes accompanied to collect folksongs early in the century. Bartk was then eager to salvage remnants
of a culture that would be inevitably destroyed by urbanization and technological civilization. It rings false when Balzs, who recognized in Bartk a genius superior to his own, gives in 1938 a doctrinal lesson to him. Returning from
an Olympics of Komi folk music, he corrects the composer: folk art is
doomed only in capitalism, for it flourishes under socialism (j Vilg 1938/4:
98). Could Balzs have been blind to the fact that the Russians artificially cultivated folk art among the minorities in order to suppress them politically?
Could Balzs forget that his own interest in fairy tales was ideologically suspect? Regrettably, Zsuffas groundbreaking and invaluable study of Balzs refrains from asking such questions. By blaming Stalinist terror for all of Balzss
artistic and human shortcomings, Zsuffas labor of love turns a Brechtian survivalist into an all-too tragic and clean hero. Hanno Loewys recent study is
more willing to display the blemishes, but prudently disregards most of Balzss exile in Moscow, in part because Balzs had written his best works earlier. The years in Moscow and the few last ones in postwar Hungary reveal his
sad artistic and intellectual decline, which still waits for a probing study.
Journals in the German language were the best publication outlets for the
Hungarian exile writers in Moscow, though their number and their lifetime
were limited, and their editors feared original ideas because they were unable
to guess what Stalins latest cultural line was. Factional strifes and tensions between the Germans and Hungarians, as well as among the Hungarians themselves, aggravated the situation.
As we saw, Linkskurve was launched in 1929 with Soviet money, and edited
by Johannes R. Becher, Ludwig Renn, and others. Gbor was removed from
the Board for his sectarian leftist deviation. Lukcs helped starting the
monthly and he published in it a number of polemical articles on German
65
authors and trends in 193132; Balzs, however, was seriously attacked in the
second issue of 1932 by a certain T. K. Fodor for overemphasizing in his Geist
des Films capitalist and petty bourgeois ideas on film production. Linkskurve
folded by the end of the year.
Internationale Literatur, which had sister journals in French and English, was
also edited by Becher, and Lukcs served on its Board from 1932 onward. The
journal published works by several Hungarian authors, foremost among them
Lukcs and Gbor. Balzs published here his Internationalisten (1936/10), a
text he called a film ballad, and he affectionately greeted in the journal two
years later the sixty-year old Herwarth Walden, editor of Der Sturm (1938/10).
To his great consternation, the Deutsche Zentral-Zeitung subsequently refused an
article of his, for traces of an alleged fascist mentality in the birthday letter. To
make things worse, Internationale Literatur published Lukcss article Schriftsteller und Kritik (Writers and Criticism), which sharply criticized writers
who utilize a single inspiration for serial novels, film scenarios, dramas, and
opera librettos (1939/910). Though Lukcs denied it, Balzs justly thought
that this was an attack on him. When he sent to the journal a rebuttal titled Subjekt und Gattung (Subject and Genre), Becher convened a meeting on January 13, 1940, which reprimanded Balzs and rejected his article. The subsequent
private exchange of angry letters between Lukcs and Balzs led to a final break
between the erstwhile intimate friends, which particularly pained Balzs. Zsuffa
has published lengthy excerpts from this correspondence (28590), but the
letters, preserved in the archives of the Hungarian Academy and the Hungarian
National Library, have not yet been published critically and integrally.
Das Wort, launched in 1936 to strengthen the spirit of a new Volksfront
politics, proudly listed Bertolt Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Willi Bredel as
its editors, but the first two lived elsewhere and the local editors were restricted by Soviet advisers. The journal rejected several of Balzss feuilletons,
but published in its 1938/3 issue his important Zur Kunstphilosophie des
Films (On the Aesthetics of Film). Most of the famous debate about Expressionism was fought out on the pages of Das Wort in 193738 between
German writers and critics. Lukcs, who occasioned the debate with his 1934
Grsse und Verfall des Expressionismus (Greatness and Decline of Expressionism), contributed to it now only a closing essay that reaffirmed his
commitment to Realism. He was not the only Hungarian communist to reject
Modernism. Balzss broader sense of Realism allowed for fairy tales and folk
tales, but he disliked Dada, Structuralism, Futurism, and even Surrealism,
though he was fascinated by dreams. Gbor, in turn, relentlessly attacked the
Avant-garde, though (or perhaps precisely because) he started in one of its
brooding places: the cabaret. Das Wort was closed down in March 1939.
66
Chapter I
Hungarian authors also published in the Deutsche Zentral-Zeitung, which was

actually edited by the Hungarian Kroly Garai under the pseudonym Karl
Krschner. The journal became another battlefield on which internecine wars
were fought out among the Hungarians, as well as between the Germans and
the Hungarians. Balzs notes in his unpublished Istra diaries that Kurt Funk
(code name of Herbert Wehner, later one of the leaders of the Social Democratic Party in the Federal Republic) spoke at a meeting about Balzss insufferable arrogance (28 verso). Hy reports on another clash. When Funk published in the Deutsche Zentral-Zeitung a critical review of Gbors collection of
short stories Die Rechnung (Reckoning; 1936), Walter Ulbricht grasped at the
opportunity to initiate an ideological purge of his own. Balzs wrote on
March 28, 1937 a letter to Barta (then still President of the German Section of
the Soviet Writers Union) in Gbors defense, and Lukcs intervened at the
key meeting. Ulbricht now turned against all Hungarian writers, but a note
from Georgi Dimitrov (alerted by Jeno Varga, Stalins top economic advisor)
resolved the conflict deus ex machine: Wilhelm Pieck was made chair, and he
shushed the turmoil (Hy, Geboren 21921; Zsuffa 248 and 467). Barta and virtually the whole editorial of the Deutsche Zentral-Zeitung were arrested in February 1938, and most of them perished.
The Bright New World of Film?
Writing journal articles and publishing books was hardly enough to eke out a
living in Moscow. Balzs and other Hungarian exiles attempted therefore to
earn money in the film industry, which had, as everywhere else in the world,
more money at its disposal. Sergei Eisentein and Vsevolod Pudowkin, two of
the worlds greatest filmmakers, worked at the time in the Soviet film industry.
Yet the experiences of the exiles in the Soviet film world were as disappointing as those in the publishing industry. As we saw, Balzs was invited to help
filming Illss g a Tisza, which portrayed battles between Romanian troops
and the army of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. Mezhrabpom finally abandoned the expensive project after infights that involved Lukcs, who defended it, and Kun, who opposed it (Zsuffa, 22022, 458). Balzs subsequently submitted a plethora of ideas and scripts to various Soviet film
organizations, but the film industry was in such turmoil that almost all of
them finally ended in the wastepaper basket. Balzss script for a film on Mozart went through various revisions and evaluations, and though he received a
contract for it, the film was finally rejected (Zsuffa 246, 293, 297). There were
many other projects, including the mentioned Internationalists (Zsuffa
244, 246) and one on the Serbian/Hungarian relations titled Blood on the
Border (Zsuffa 306 f). Balzss anti-Nazi script about a boy in the Third
67
Reich, originally titled Hold out Charley and finally released as Karl Brunner,
was the only film to materialize, but, to his great chagrin, in a badly cut version
produced in Odessa. Like all of Balzss anti-Nazi juvenile books, the film
stopped circulating when Molotov and Ribbentrop signed their non-aggression pact, but was recovered from the mothballs when Germany invaded the
Soviet Union (Zsuffa 253, 261, 279).
The financial expectations that Balzs attached to his film projects materialized, however, when he brought successful law suits against film companies
that broke their contracts with him (Zsuffa 270, 280). He earned good money
also by converting his Mozart and other scenarios into plays and highly successful children books. As a result, Balzs could live comfortably, and he
could even buy a dacha in Istra, some fifty kilometers from Moscow. Moving
there with his wife in 1937, he wrote the poem My House on his idyllic life,
which irked a many of his less fortunate fellow exiles (Zsuffa 25253, 268).
The Soviet film world was gloomy in those years. Sink reports that one
day in 1937 he found the dejected Eisenstein in the room of the famous writer
Isaac Babel, with whom Sink shared an apartment. A ranking Party Committee just stopped the filming of Bezhin Lug (Bezhin Meadow). As Babel told
Sink subsequently, Eisenstein burst into his room like a madman, cursing,
gnashing his teeth, banging his head with his fist, now crying and now laughing (regny 469). Throw him out, or my heart will rend Babel repeated to
Sink a well-known adage, whose truth he just realized. He cooperated with
Eisenstein, but could not help him. The film director had to confess his mistakes in International Literature before he could continue with other projects.
Boris Shumyatsky, who had been the czar of Soviet film production and a patron of Balzs, confessed his sins with less success: he was deposed, accused of economic and political mismanagement, arrested, and finally shot. It
is quite shocking therefore to read Anna Balzss remark that her husbands
memos made him very trustworthy in the eyes of the GPU, and contributed
to the unmasking of Shumyatsky, a skillful saboteur (Balzs dossier Ms
5024/1 at the Hungarian Academy, 6). Complaining about the years he lost by
filming g a Tisza, Balzs also writes on January 2, 1940 in his unpublished
Istra Diary about a struggle he had against everybody in Odessa, including
Shumyatsky: At that time I fought an uncanny dark power, for I had not even
an inkling [] that I was dealing with an organized counter-revolutionary
force that reached all the way to the highest top(13 verso). Could Balzs
genuinely believe the official explanation that Shumyatsky, instead of being
simply incompetent, was actually planning a counter-revolution with others?
Mezhrabpom, the organization that had invited Balzs and helped others,
was an arm of Willi Mnzenbergs Internationale Arbeiter Hilfe (IAH = Inter-
68
Chapter I
national Workers Relief), originally set up to provide food for the famished
Russian population. It survived the great reorganization of the film industry
in 1930, but was liquidated in June 1936. Sink had also received a contract for
a film script from Mezhrabpom, but its successor, Mosfilm, broke the
contract and rejected the script. The nave Sink, encouraged by journalistic
outcries against mismanagements in the industry, wrote an angry letter to
Pravda, in which he mentioned that Babel helped him complete the script.
Babel was panic-stricken when he learned about this, and he retrieved the yet
unpublished letter from Pravda without consulting with Sink. Like Balzs,
Sink initiated a lawsuit against the film company, but had a bitter disappointment: Babel promised to support him, but flatly denied in court ever having
talked to Sink about the script, or knowing anything about it (regny
504508). Babels fear overruled his friendship, and not without reason: he
soon disappeared in the purges.
Hys experiences with Mezhrabpom were lucrative, but also unproductive.
Soon after his arrival, he received a contract for a yet unspecified subject, and
he was also given an advance (Geboren 184). The Partys Central Committee
then decided, without asking him, that the film was to portray the Volga Germans living in their own autonomous Republic. Hy and Erwin Piscator, the
chosen director, were even taken for a field trip to the Republic, but after
several radical revisions (and new advances) the day of reckoning finally arrived: Mezhrabpom was dissolved and its facilities were given to a company
making films for children (Geboren 19499, 207209). The final act of Hys
tragi-comic film experiences was staged in Alma Ata, Kazakhstan, where Hy,
Balzs, and other film people were evacuated during the war: Eisenstein
started to film with his students Hys Haben, but the filming was interrupted
by an order to do a film about Ivan the Terrible, Stalins model. Once more,
the completed film about Ivan exposed Eisenstein to Stalins ire (Geboren 260,
26365).
Diaries and Memoirs over Terror
We shall never fathom the logic of Stalins purges. Nor shall we know what any
particular individual actually thought and felt in those years. About the reactions of exiles there is, in any case, a dearth of honest and reliable (or even unreliable!) material. Zuffa claims, with some evidence, that, apart from Soviet
authors, Hungarian writers have presented the most profound and diverse
published portrayals of the period of the purges (472). Indeed, the German
writers left no comparable records behind. Still, the material is, understandably,
thin. When Sink confided to a Hungarian comrade that he kept a diary, the
man exclaimed: My god! No other idiot among the two-hundred million in-
69
habitants of the Soviet Union would write a diary! I merely ask that you refrain during my life and after my death from linking my name to your Moscow
stay (regny 15). Sink kept his word, and the respondent remains anonymous.
Neither Lukcs nor Gbor left any records that would indicate doubts
about the system. Did they have none? Did they believe that all the disappeared and executed ones were enemy spies plotting to overthrow the regime
as some of Balzss diary entries seem to suggest, or were they simply reluctant to take risks by recording those doubts? The only evidence we have about
them are passages in Hys memoirs, which indicate that Gbor, whom he
highly respected, frequently turned his caustic humor against the situation in
the Soviet Union. Most of the Hungarian communist exiles were reluctant to
speak frankly about their experiences in letters, diaries, memoirs, or autobiographical fiction. They were afraid, not only during their exile, but even after
Stalins death, Khrushchevs revelations, and Gorbatchevs glasnost.
Still, Sinks diaries, Hys memoirs, Lengyels factual and curiously unreflective diaries, and Balzss still unpublished Russisches Tagebuch from
1932 and Istra diaries (started on January 2, 1940) offer us some fascinating
insights into the conditions and the mentalities of the Moscow exiles. Of the
four texts, written in different styles and genres, that of Sink offers the most
insightful, exciting, and disturbing reading, for it records not only what he saw
but also how he reacted to it, and how he reassessed himself as a result. Hys
Geboren 1900 (Born 1900) published after Hy went into his last exile in the
1960s were written with hindsight and may not convey accurately his impressions, mood, and disposition back then. They offer, however, excellent
character portrayals, good anecdotes, and plenty of information about events
behind-the-scenes in a witty and sarcastic style. Both Sink and Hy reveal
the gradual and belated awakening of a nave communist believer, but their
focalizations differ: Sink writes in a Dostoevskian manner about a soul
tossed around in a physical and spiritual hell, whereas Hy, writing from a safe
distance, brightens the nightmare by foregrounding its grotesqueness. Having
no foot on the ground, Sinkos diarist is stunned, perplexed, and hurt by endless personal and bureaucratic humiliations. Hy, like everybody else, must
also have lived in fear and trembling, but he had a more secure position within
the exile community and the Soviet hierarchy than Sink, and the temporal
distance between experiencing and writing renders a much more stable autobiographical I in the text, which, in turn, precipitates in a more assertive and
sovereign style. While Sink consistently questions himself and his beliefs,
Hy tends to blame the others and the world at large.
And Balzs? Hard to guess. As we saw, many of his published texts project
the image of a firm and nave believer; he is more critical in some unpublished
70
Chapter I
manuscripts, but his criticism is not directed against the system as such. Instead, he self-righteously protests against individuals and institutions that allegedly treated him unjustly, and such protests could be posed (as in the case
of his comments on the film industry) as attempts to defend the system
against its abuses. Nothing from Balzss Moscow years compares to the selfexaminations of his Vienna diaries. In Vienna, he assumed a German/Austrian identity but agonized about his Hungarian Jewishness; in Moscow, he
was outraged that his name was absent from Bechers list of German writers
in exile (Zsuffa 27576), and he was unhappy that his application for Soviet
citizenship was rejected. In contrast, the Polish Jewish writer Aleksander Wat
organized a massive resistance in 1943, when the NKVD tried to force the
Polish refugees in Kazakhstan to exchange their Polish passports for Soviet
ones. Wat almost miraculously survived the savage prison tortures, perpetrated by cellmates planted there by the NKVD (Wat 36182).
We get a sense of the differences if we compare what Sink, Hy, and Balzs wrote (and did not write) concerning the Stalinist attacks on Dmitri Shostakovichs opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which initiated a radical purge within
the arts. The opera had been performed to enthusiastic crowds night after
night when Sink arrived in Moscow; as a great honor, his host organization
provided him tickets to the opera, which has meanwhile become a highlight of
modern opera in general. However, an article in the Pravda attacked the opera
on January 28, 1936, calling it decadent, wild noise, cacophony, and an operatic adaptation of Vsevolod Meyerholds avant-garde theater practice. The article concluded that this was a game with serious things that may end badly
(regny 37375). To his dismay, Sink found that the German translation of the
article in the Deutsche Zentral-Zeitung applied, presumably unintentionally,
Goebbels term Entartete Kunst to the opera. He was equally disturbed to see
that former aficionados of the opera now hypocritically adopted Pravdas vicious tone. They were joined by orchestrated protests of workers and peasants. Shostakovich was instructed to return to folklore, to compose in tune
with the taste and culture of the folk instead of creating from within (regny 392).
Hy reports on the affair by way of a caf conversation with the theater director Gustav von Wangenheim and his wife (Geboren 203206). Panicstricken, they had requested a meeting, for they were convinced that the
Pravda article, surely inspired by Stalin, would have far-reaching consequences. The opera will be removed from the program, Shostakovich, this
enemy of the people, will lose his job, his income, and his friends, and very
likely be exiled to the countryside so that he can listen to folk songs. The main
reason for panic was, however, personal: von Wangenheim made the fatal
71
mistake of recommending (in writing!) that Shostakovich be the composer of

the film he was to make on Dimitrov. Von Wangenheim was sure that he
would have to do a public penance in connection with the Shostakovich affair,
and Hy was to avoid him, lest also getting into trouble. As most of Hys vignettes, his caf conversation is well crafted, and emblematic of the social and
political situation. It makes fun of Hys own navet, but it includes no critical
or deeper reflections.
What Balzs privately thought of the affair we do not know. However, he
published a relevant article two years later in the j Hang. Reporting on the
preparations for the twentieth anniversary of the glorious October Revolution, he compared the two-year old Shostakovich affair with the new case of
Vsevolod Meyerhold, who was accused not only of avant-garde stagings and
unpopularity, but (oh the daring!) of celebrating the anniversary with a dramatization of Dame au camlias by Alexandre Dumas fils. There is trouble with
Meyerhold and there is no longer trouble with Shostakovich, informed Balzs his readers at the outset (j Hang 1938/2: 112). After doing public penance for his mistakes the composer was commissioned to write his Fifth Symphony for the anniversary, and this, composed in the right style, became an
enormous success. Hence Balzs concluded: No, nobody wants to suppress
individuality here. Could Meyerhold not succeed in what Shostakovich had already succeeded (j Hang 1938/2: 115)? We may ask in turn, whether Balzs
genuinely believed that Shostakovichs genuflection affirmed Soviet artistic
freedom.
Unlike many of his Hungarian and German communist colleagues, and
most friends of the Soviet Union in the West, Sink analyzed the pervasive
fear that deformed characters and prevented meaningful human contact.
However, like Hy, he did not immediately recognize why a certain official
suddenly became unreachable. Indeed, he learned only after he left the Soviet
Union that virtually everybody who was responsible for dealing with his projects disappeared in the purges, some of them while he was still in Moscow.
Neither did (or could) he anticipate that some of Moscows most devoted
Hungarian communists would also disappear. Foremost among these was, of
course, Kun, who apparently took up Sinks cause with great enthusiasm and
warmth. His opinion carried great weight in 1935, but Sink did not know
that his support became countereffective towards the end of his Moscow stay.
Sink reencountered in Moscow Sndor Barta (regny 17477). He knew
him as an activist in Kassks Ma group, and as editor of the journal Akasztott
ember (Hanged Man), which Barta started after his break with Kassk in 1922.
Barta showed Sink one evening his mentioned poem on Stalin, which addressed the leader in the refrain as our good father. When Sink ventured
72
Chapter I
the opinion that he preferred the poems in Bartas Akasztott ember, Barta
smiled with an air of superiority: I believe in Stalin (regny 176). Whether he
held on to his belief in prison and on his way to execution we shall never know.
Kroly Garai, editor of the Deutsche Zentral-Zeitung and one of Sinks best
friends in Moscow, asked him at the farewell: You are not going to bring
shame on us out there. Will you? (regny 555) Was Garai afraid that his outspoken friend would become a traitor to a cause in which he, Garai, still
firmly believed? Or was he afraid that Sink might say things about him in the
West that could get him in trouble in Moscow? That fear sat deep in Garais
faithful soul became evident to Sink early during his stay, when Garai emphatically advised him not to look for Sarolta Lnyis address, for her husband
was imprisoned. As it turned out, Czbel returned from the Gulag several
years later, but neither faith nor fear could save Garai: he died in 1942, during
his second arrest (Sink, regny esp. 555 and 625).
The purges also eliminated Ervin Bauer, Balzss brother and a leading biologist (see Mikls Mller). When Balzs heard about this in the summer of
1937, he wrote a letter to the German Section of the Comintern, for he felt
obliged to inform them that his bad childhood relationship with his brother
worsened in exile for political reasons: Ervin joined the Kun Faction (a bad
connection by 1937), whereas Bla and his wife sympathized with the
Landler Faction. Balzs lied by claiming he had no personal contact with his
brother in the Soviet Union, but he courageously defended (unsuccessfully)
the arrested Frigyes Kariks (Zsuffa 263 & 472). Of the remaining Hungarian
exiles, Jzsef Lengyel was arrested in 1938 and confessed under torture that
he was a spy; he was released from prison eight years later but was sent to
Siberia in 1948, and returned to Hungary only in 1955. Even Lukcs was arrested for a month; allegedly it was Mtys Rkosi who successfully intervened to free him (Hy, Geboren 277).
Paris: its Exile Cultures

As Pascale Casanova has shown with occasional exaggeration, Paris was until
recently Europes cultural and literary capital. This is where the important literary trends originated, where writers and artists from all over the world
oriented themselves about the latest literary trends and fashions, and most expatriates, emigrants, and exiles settled temporarily or permanently if they
were allowed to.
73
Exile in Interwar Paris

The Hungarian Germanophiles of the Weimar Republic proclaimed Unser
Paris ist heute Berlin (Today, our Paris is Berlin), but by 1933 the love had
evaporated, and the exiles fleeing from the Nazis turned, once more, to Paris.
Not without difficulties. The adventures that Sink had to face after his return from Moscow exemplify that exiles had to fear here not only the French
bureaucracy but often the long arm of Moscow as well. Evicted from Moscow
in 1937, he returned to Paris in May 1939 with debts and a still unpublished
manuscript. He managed to place a few reviews and articles in communist and
fellow-traveler journals, but after giving a carefully worded lecture about his
Moscow experiences to The Friends of the Soviet Union he was baffled to
notice that his accepted articles did not get into print. Finally, a distinguished
lady discreetly informed him that his lecture did not please the comrades in
power; but, she added, the said comrades would find opportunities to publish
his articles and his book manuscript if he openly defended the Soviet trials
and executions: vous serez lanc (you will be launched) she concluded. Sink
found out later that the Moscow directives were transmitted to the French literary circuit by Louis Aragon, the powerful French communist poet (regny
600609). Sink refused to comply: he escaped from France to Bosnia when
the war broke out, and, after an Italian internment on Croatian islands, he
joined the Yugoslav partisans. Titos break with the Comintern in 1948 permitted the publication not only of the novel Optimistk (1953) but also of his
book about his Moscow experiences, first in Croatian translation (1955) and
finally in the Hungarian original (1961). He became professor of Hungarian
literature at the new established Yugoslav university of Novi Sad in 1959.
We shall discuss separately the avant-garde Jewish Romanians who became
an integral part of the Parisian scene. The other Romanians who came to Paris
included Emil Cioran, who arrived in 1937, and Eugne Ionesco, who had already spent much of his childhood in France. He returned there to complete
his doctorate in 1938, stayed in Marseille during the war, and moved to Paris
afterwards. Several Romanians who survived the war became prominent on
the French postwar cultural scene and recognized writers in the French language. As we shall see, others joined them after the war and came to play comparably important roles in French literature and culture.
The East-Central European exiles reaching Paris in 193839 found the city
and the country already crowded with exiles and migrs from Germany, who
were desperately trying to get permits to stay or visas to leave. These German
experiences gave rise to novels such as Anna Segherss Transit and Lion Feuchtwangers Exil. Their portrayal of an inhuman French bureaucracy became a
reality also for the East-Central European writers following them. Ferenc
74
Chapter I
Fejto, who fled from Hungary in 1938, encountered a cold wind of foreigner
hatred at the police station when applying for a residency permit, but he still
considered France more hospitable to potential migrs than Switzerland,
England, or the US (Budapesttol Prizsig 215). Gyrgy Faludy, who also fled in
1938, rallies all his wit in My Happy Days in Hell to save his love affair:
the villainy of the authorities and the unbearable atmosphere at the Prfecture failed to
drive me to despair. My old friends who were more experienced in emigration than I was
had warned me in good time that only communists and to a certain extent Catholics
were loyal to their own kind, democrats never. I knew what to expect. I had sought
asylum in France, not loyalty, and, though in the most heartless form possible, that
asylum had been granted.
When, after the outbreak of the war, the general loathing for foreigners increased, it
found me and my fellow-emigrants utterly indifferent to it. The continuous insults drove
us out to the margin of society and we knew it was useless to remind the French that we
were all in the same boat.
Thus conditions threw us together and our double exile from Hungary and from
French society lent our friendships and conversations extraordinary intensity. We felt
like a bunch of roving knights hopelessly in love with the same woman, but whether that
womans name was Hungaria or Marianne was a secret we kept from each other and
often from ourselves as well. Though we stopped wooing the lady we preserved our love
for her, and remained haughtily true to that love, because love is ones private affair and
in no way concerns its object. (35)
Faludys unrequited double infatuation was further tested when the German
troops took over Paris in 1939 and her lover had to decide whether to stay
or, reluctantly, seek another separation or divorce. Faludy adventurously continued to Casablanca and he was, in due time, admitted to the US. Fejto joined
in February 1940 a hastily assembled and badly equipped volunteer unit of
foreigners that the French officers treated with contempt. Luckily, he was declared unfit; the unit was used as cannon fodder in the battles at the Somme in
June that year, and most of it, including the Hungarian writer Andrs Hevesi,
perished (Fejto 26870). Fejto survived in Vichy-government territory, hiding
for three years in a hut owned by Andr Malrauxs ex-wife.
The Polish exile Andrzej Bobkowski (see Katarzyna Jerzaks article below)
was evacuated from Paris but returned to it and continued to record his observations, which he later published under the title Szkice pirkiem (Sketched
with a Quill; 1957). Like Faludy, Bobkowski was enamored with the country
but disgusted by its easy surrender: I see France naked, lying in Toulon like a
whore. She is waiting and smiling with resignation, opens her legs (11. 9.
1940).
Though Paris lost some of its luster after World War II, it continued to attract exiles from East-Central Europe and remained a center of exile publications. Those who fled the communist postwar regimes, had to confront the
75
Marxists and communists who came to dominate the French intellectual and
artistic elite. They were hostile to critics of the communist regimes in Eastern
Europe, at least until the Soviet crushing of the 1956 Hungarian revolution,
often even beyond it. These ideological differences are portrayed in the
autobiography of the Russian migr Nina Berberova, The Italics are Mine
(1969), as well as in Fejtos account of his various conflicts with French communists or fellow-travelers, from Louis Aragon, Elsa Triolet (who was actually a Russian migr), Romain Rolland, and Le Corbusier to Jean-Paul Satre
and Simone de Beauvoir. At the request of Mihly Krolyi, Hungarian ambassador in Paris immediately after the war, Fejto became chief of the Press
Bureau at the embassy. Against his own convictions he defended at a press
conference in 1949 the Hungarian trial against Cardinal Mindszenty (34950),
but when Lszl Rajk, his childhood friend and former communist Minister
of Interior, was arrested and tried, he resigned, asked for asylum in France,
and wrote a series of articles on the matter for the journal Esprit. The publication of these articles was considerably delayed, however, for the French
Communist Party got wind of their imminent publication and put great pressure on the editors to reject them, claiming that Fejto was a fascist and an agent
(37374). Fejto actually became a highly respected journalist and political
scientist on the French and European scene, but the Left kept trying to discredit him, as Fejtos account of his talks with Julien Benda (371) and Sartre
(42429) shows.
The Hungarian Uprising of 1956 shook the faith of many a French communists, yet they were reluctant to receive the new exiles and accept their reports, as an anecdote in Endre (Andr) Kartsons memoirs illustrates the
issue. The young Kartson, recipient of a scholarship at the cole Normale
Superieur, was called soon after his arrival to the office of the great Marxist
philosopher Louis Althusser, to give a personal account of the events in Hungary. He spoke for about an hour and a half, while Althusser silently chewed
on his pipe. At the end of Kartsons account Althusser remarked, vous tes
un fasciste (you are a fascist), pushed him into the corridor, and slammed the
door behind him (Kartson 1: 234).
Paris continued to hold great attraction for the Romanian exiles and
migrs. Mircea Eliade, who chose to remain in the Romanian diplomatic service during the war, lived in Paris until he was invited by the University of Chicago in 1957. Ionesco became an international celebrity when his first play,
Cantatrice chauve (The Bald Soprano), inaugurated in 1948 what became known
as the Theater of the Absurd. Monica Lovinescu was sent from Romania to
study but defected in 1948 (see Camela Craciuns study below), and so did
Lovinescus future husband, Virgil Ierunca. One of Lovinescus first jobs in
76
Chapter I
Paris was to translate under a pseudonym the novel La Vingt cinquime heure
(The Twenty-fifth Hour) by her exiled compatriot Virgil Constantin Gheorghiu. It became a great international success and was made into a similarly
successful film by the Turkish-born French director Henri Verneuil, with
Anthony Quinn, Virna Lisi, and Michael Redgrave. The book follows the
now hilarious now pathetic fortunes of a simple Romanian village youngster.
A local policeman desires his wife and sends him into a concentration camp
for Jews. From now on, a number of mistaken identities are forced upon
Johann Moritz: he becomes a Romanian inmate in a Hungarian camp, a Hungarian inmate in a German camp, a Nazi camp guard, a DP camp inmate, and
finally a volunteer to fight the Russians. Gheorghiu believed that we lived
in the twenty-fifth hour to rescue the individual from the machinery of dictatorial systems. In 1963 he was anointed in Paris as a Romanian Orthodox priest.
The Avant-garde
The Parisian avant-garde movements had not only lively contacts with EastCentral European writers and artists but were to a considerable degree inspired and carried by exiles, expatriates, and migrs from the region. Their
contributions represent an important chapter in the history of Paris as an
East-Central European cultural center.
The contributions differed, however, from country to country. Lajos Kassk and his Hungarian Activists around the journal Ma flourished and attained international significance during their Viennese exile (see above and
va Forgcss article in this volume) but they withered after Kassks return to
Hungary in 1926. In any case, the orientation of the Activists was, even during
their peak years, German rather than French. A genuine Hungarian/French
symbiosis came about only when Tibor Papp and Pl Nagy launched in 1962
the journal Magyar Muhely (Hungarian Workshop), and in 1972 its French
sister publication datelier (see ron Kibdi Vargas article below). What they
call szveg (text), is actually a hybrid between verbal and visual genres that
often incorporates a wide variety borrowed elements. The artists and writers
around the Magyar Muhely worked in cooperation and exchange with the
French avant-garde.
The Czech avant-garde of the 1920s was strong and broad. However, the
Devetsil group and its poetists were oriented until around 1930 mainly towards
Russian Constructivism. Only once the leading poetists became disappointed
with events in the Soviet Union did they turn to Andr Breton and his Surrealism. Breton, who made several visits to Prague in the 1930s, held a high
opinion of his Czech colleagues, yet none of these fled to Paris under the
77
threat of Hitler and the war. Most Polish avant-gardists held on longer to their
communist creed; as we have seen, some of them fled to the Soviet Union already in the 1920s and early 30s, others in 1939. Many of them did not survive
the purges. Of those who did return home after the war only Aleksander Wat
made it to Paris in the 1960s, but he was by then seriously ill and distant from
the avant-garde orientation of his youth.
At the heart of the Parisian/East-Central European avant-garde symbiosis
were Romanian artists and writers who emigrated or fled to Paris, following
the footsteps of the sculptor Constantin Brncusi and those of Tristan Tzara,
who had arrived from Zrichs Dadaist Caf Voltaire in 1919. Benjamin
Fondane and Claude Sernet [Mihail Cosma] came in the 1920s, Ilarie Voronca
followed in 1931. All three of these writers immediately started to write and
publish in French, and thus rapidly accommodated themselves within the Parisian avant-garde scene, though they continued to keep their Romanian ties
and thereby performed an important bridge function in the interwar years.
Fondane died in a concentration camp; Sernet and Voronca, also of Jewish
descent, survived the war in France, but Voronca committed suicide in 1946.
In Romania, a second generation of avant-garde writers with surrealist
orientation gathered around the short-lived but important journal unu
(192832). Returning in 1938 from a stay in Paris, Gherasim Luca and Gellu
Naum founded a Romanian surrealist group, which could not develop public
activities during the war, but produced manuscripts that were published in the
immediate postwar years. Indeed, Sarane Alexandrians highly respected book
on Surrealism and dream devotes a whole section to the Romanian surrealists
(22129). He praises their polemical and highly eclectic views on dreams, delirium, love, death, class struggle, and dialectical materialism, and calls the
group the most exuberant, the most adventurous, and even the most delirious one within [postwar] international Surrealism (221). The groups theoretical basis was formulated by Luca and Dolfi Trost in Dialectique de la dialectique. Message adress au mouvement surrealiste internationale (The Dialectic of
Dialectic. Message Addressed to the International Surrealist Movement),
published in Romania in 1945. Since Surrealism in the West was still in
shambles at that point, the message did not immediately reach its intended
audience. The same is true of Lucas volume, also published in 1945, in Romanian, which contained three texts that formulated his life-long concerns:
Inventatorul iubirii, Parcurg imposibilul, and Moartea moarta (The Inventor of Love;
I Roam the Impossible; The Death of Death). Things changed, when Lucas
second attempt to escape from Romania succeeded, and he reached Paris via
Israel in 1952. Befriending and cooperating with Jean Arp, Paul Celan, Max
Ernst, and others, Luca produced a number of publications that combined
78
Chapter I
images and texts; he cut images into squares and reassembled them in a new
way (cubomania), and he worked out the reflections of his Romanian youth
on violent erotic love, the overcoming of Oedipal drive (well before Deleuze
and Guattari wrote on anti-Oedipus), freedom through creativity, and suicide
(Carlat, Raileanu, and Alexandrian 22729). In the later 1960s, Luca became a
sort of international celebrity with his unique poetry readings, which were
based on language destruction, simulation of aphasia, stuttering, and repetition. This led Gilles Deleuze to quip that Luca was a great poet among the
greatest: he invented a prodigious stammering, his own (Dialogues 10). The
newspaper Le Monde once reported: To hear and to see Ghrasim Luca read
is like rediscovering the primordial power of poetry, its prophetic force and
subversive effect. Luca terminated his life while preparing his Romanian
texts for republication; he jumped into the Seine, and his body was found
much later, almost a replica of a suicide he described in Moartea moarta.
Isidore Isou, another Romanian avant-gardist in postwar France, arrived
already in 1945, at the age of twenty, full of ideas he already had formulated on
the principles of Lettrism. He started the Lettrist movement with Gabriel Pomerand as soon as he arrived. Two years later, Isou published his historical
view of poetry and music, Introduction une nouvelle posie et une nouvelle musique
(Introduction to a New Poetry and a New Music), which he then gradually extended to painting, architecture, dance, photography, film, and the theater.
Isous historical scheme distinguished between amplic and chiseling
phases. The amplic one, represented in poetry by Homer, establishes a paradigm within which subsequent ages produce new works. When the possibilities of the paradigm are exhausted, the chiseling phase starts to deconstruct
it, so that in the end only shattered fragments are left, ready to be recombined
in a new amplic phase. Isou regarded himself and his Lettrists as creators of a
new amplic art, in which the elements no longer functioned referentially but
as empty absolute signs an idea that actually had already a long history in
absolute music, symbolist poetry, and certain forms of abstract art. A
number of poets and artists joined Isous Lettrist movement, though, inevitably, it soon had to face internal strife and defections. Isou also ventured into
filmmaking, and his first film, Trait de bave et dternit (Treatise of Slime and
Eternity), produced in 1951, won the best avant-garde prize, especially created for it at the Cannes Film Festival.
In more than one sense, the poet Paul Celan from Czernowitz (today Chernivtsi in the Ukraine) could be included among the Romanian avant-gardists
just discussed, and not only because he was a Romanian Jew who settled in
Paris after he had survived the Holocaust. He came to know the Romanian
surrealists immediately after the war, was a good friend of Luca, and, as in the
79
case of Isou as well as Luca, the transformation of poetic language was at the
very heart of his work. Amy Colin goes so far as to claim that it was not until
Celan became friends with Roumanian avant-gardists in Bucharest (194547)
that he acquired so deep a knowledge of their major poetic theories as to visibly shape his own mode of writing (75). However, Luca, Isou and others unfolded the poetic ideas of their Romanian youths while switching from Romanian to French, whereas Celan, who wrote only a few texts in Romanian in
the postwar years, held on to his German, even if he struggled to go beyond it
for political as well as poetic reasons.
Parisian Literary Institutions
Ervin Sinks futile efforts to publish his novel in France may suggest that
the French editors and publishers were as hostile to the exiled writers as the
police and the bureaucrats. However, Sinks failure to sell his thousandpage Hungarian novel was a-typical. Though many other manuscripts in
foreign languages were also rejected, some were accepted and published in
translation (e.g. works by Virgil Gheorghiu and Kundera), and those who
switched to French (e.g. Cioran, Horia, Ionesco, Fejto, Kristof, Isou, Luca,
and the later Kundera) had reasonably good chances to publish with such
well-established publishers as Gallimard, Corti, Plon, Fayard, and Seuil.
Newspapers and journals were generally hospitable to exiled writers, save
those that followed a communist or radical left-wing editorial policy. This
was in good measure due to some outstanding mediators and translators,
foremost among them Franois Bondy, Konstanty Aleksander Jelenski, and
Lszl Gara. Bondy, himself from the region, edited important journals; the
Polish Jelenski, who arrived in 1939, published in 1965 an anthology of
Polish poetry since the Middle Ages (Anthologie de la posie polonaise), and he
himself translated Miosz, Karol Wojtya (the later Pope), and Gombrowicz;
Gara who had lived abroad before the war, returned to Hungary afterwards, and left again in 1956 put together a similar volume of Hungarian
poetry (Anthologie de la posie hongroise de XII. sicle nos jours) already in 1962,
a few years before he committed suicide.
Publishing with French companies or in French journals could not, of
course, fill the need of all exiled writers, partly because many of them did not
master French sufficiently, and, perhaps more importantly, because many of
them considered it their mission to write for a native audience both at home
and abroad. Hence the emergence of exile journals and publishers, most of
which were short-lived; those that survived lived on precariously at the edge
of a financial abyss. To the printed words we have to add an important new
medium that cultivated the native languages in spoken form: the radio. A
80
Chapter I
number of exiled writers, foremost among them Monica Lovinescu and her
husband Virgil Ierunca, worked for Radio Free Europe and Radio France Internationale in Paris. As we shall see, many more exiled writers worked for the
BBC in London, for the Voice of America in Washington D.C. or New York,
and at the Munich headquarters (as well as elsewhere) for Radio Free Europe.
We include in our volume separate essays on Lovinescus broadcasts and on
the three leading Parisian journals from East-Central Europe: the Polish Kultura, the Czech Svedectv (Testimony), and the Hungarian Irodalmi jsg (Literary Gazette). All three of them were started elsewhere and transferred to
Paris: Jerzy Giedroyc moved Kultura from Rome to Paris in 1947, Pavel Tigrid
brought Svedectv from New York to Paris in 1960, and Tibor Mray assumed
in 1962 the editorship of the Irodalmi jsg in Paris; the previous editor was
Gyrgy Faludy in London. To avoid duplication, here we merely interconnect
these Parisian journals and situate them in a broader picture. One of the most
striking facts about these otherwise excellent journals is that no regular contacts or exchanges existed between them. Each focused on its own native
audience, which meant giving space to political and literary events in the
world at large but devoting minimal attention to the neighbors in East-Central Europe save in moments of political crisis, especially if they involved
writers. This blindspot is particularly surprising, since none of the three editors was an ardent nationalist, carrying old political grudges against the neighboring countries. Indeed, Giedroyc and Kultura took the unpopular view that
Poland must accept its 1945 borders and find ways to cooperate with its eastern neighbors. The most sensitive issue in this respect was the situation of the
Hungarian minority in Transylvania; the persistence of old resentments prevented joint resistance against Causescus regime even among exiles (see John
Neubauers article on the Irodalmi jsg below).
A galaxy of other East-Central Europe journals was also published in Paris,
although the most enduring ones were published in Munich (the Hungarian
j Lthatr), London (the Polish Wiadomosci and Kontynenty), and New York.
The Parisian publications included the mentioned Magyar Muhely; the Romanian Luceafarul. Revista scriitorilor romni n exil (Luceafarul [Evening Star]. The
Magazine of Romanian Writers in Exile) edited by Mircea Eliade in 194849;
and several short-lived journals edited by Virgil Ierunca, among them Caete de
Dor: Metazica si poezie (Notebooks of Pain. Metaphysics and Poetry), Limite,
and Ethos. Only Dumitru Tepeneags Cahiers de lEst, made a genuine effort to
bring together the literatures of the East-Central European nations.
Kultura had its own important publishing house, the Instytut Literacki,
while the Irodalmi jsg started to publish books in the 1980s, and so did the
Magyar Muhely. However, only the Instytut Literacki became a major under-
81
taking. Paris did not become a center for publishing books in the other EastCentral European languages. Such ventures developed rather in Munich, Canada, the US, and elsewhere.
London
For the nineteenth-century East-Central European writers and artists, London was apparently much less exciting than Paris. Next to Cyprian Norwid,
who lived there briefly in the 1850s, we can mention only the Hungarian
Ferenc Pulszky, who escaped from Hungary after the 184849 revolution
(he was condemned to death in absentia in 1852) and enthusiastically helped
in exile Lajos Kossuths political plans for a number of years. During his
eight years in London, Pulszky became an important figure, even an authority, in the aristocratic and art-loving circles of the city, and this experience
became invaluable for him when he was granted amnesty in 1866 and became for twenty-five years Director of the Hungarian National Museum,
and President of the Literary Section at the Hungarian Academy. We should
mention here also Joseph Conrad, though he was an migr rather than
an exile. After many years of voyaging, he settled in Kent rather than
London City.
There was no exodus of East-Central European exiles to London after
World War I and during the interwar years. The refugees started to arrive,
however, when the Nazi threat became ominous, and their number swelled
when the German forces entered France. Exiles in France now desperately
tried to escape further to England or, via Spain and Portugal, to the US. London became the seat of the Polish Government in Exile, which coordinated a
huge worldwide army numbering 200 000 by the end of the war. As mentioned, the Polish writers Jerzy Pietrkiewicz and Antoni Sonimski came to
London, and so did the Czech Frantisek Langer and Pavel Tigrid (a name he
adopted in London), the Slovaks Vladimr Clementis and Theo Florin, and
the Hungarian Pl Ignotus. Gyrgy Mikes was a reporter in London for two
Hungarian papers, and remained there. His book How to Be an Alien (1946) became an enormous success.
The Serbian Milos Crnjanski, lost his job as press attach at the Yugoslavian embassy in Rome when Italy declared war against Yugoslavia. He came
to London in 1941 and became a member of the Yugoslav Government in
Exile. More important for us, he wrote a novel about exile titled Roman o Londonu (A Novel about London), which, however, was published only in 1971,
after his return to Yugoslavia in 1965 (see Guido Snels article below).
82
Chapter I
London experienced a remarkable two-way exile traffic in the immediate

postwar years. Langer, Clementis, Tigrid, Ignotus, Plczi-Horvth (in 1947),
and Sonimski (in 1951) returned home, as did many members of the Polish
Home Army and the Polish Government in Exile. Most of them were jailed,
tortured, sent to hard labor camps without formal court decisions, or, as in
the case of Clementis, executed. Zygmunt awrynowicz, Bolesaw Taborski,
Florian Smieja, Tadeusz Sukowski, and other Polish veterans settled as
writers in London. Some went on to the US (see Bogusaw Wrblewskis article below).
In 1945, Polish literature became institutionalized in London. An Association of Polish Writers in Exile was founded, and Mieczysaw Grydzewski
started the journal Wiadomosci (News), a rather conservative publication
whose name suggested, however, a link ro the prewar left-wing Warsaw periodical Wiadomosci Literackie. Adam Czerniawski founded in 1959 the new journal Kontynenty (Continents; 1964), which rebelled against the migr tradition
and gained the support of awrynowicz and Smieja, as well as the young
writers Bogdan Czaykowski, Jerzy S. Sito, Jan Darowski, Taborski, and Andrzej Busza, some of whom lived in Canada. Since these writers wanted to
reach readers at home, they allowed the publication of their texts in Poland,
thus defying a 1956 resolution of the Association of Polish Writers in Exile
that forbade its members to maintain any contact with communist Poland.
The Oficyna Poetw i Malarzy (Publishing House of Poets and Painters), established and run by Czesaw Bednarczyk and his wife, published poetry and
prose, and subsidized the publications of young poets. Between 1949 and
1991, the Oficyna published about a thousand volumes of poetry and prose.
The authors included Miosz, awrynowicz, Taborski, Czaykowski, and Sukowski, as well as Jan Brzekowski, Janusz Ihnatowicz, Stempowski, Marian
Pankowski, Vincenz, and Tymon Terlecki.
Jerzy Pietrkiewicz, who got a degree at the University of St. Andrews, became one of the best-integrated Polish writers in British literary life, especially
once he started in 1951 to write highly regarded novels in English under the
name Peterkiewicz. He became Professor of Polish and even Dean of the
School of East-European and Slavonic Studies at the University of London.
As Christine Brooke-Rose, his ex-wife, writes, when he stopped writing
poetry in Polish and turned to the novel he underwent a slow Jamesian shift
in subject matter, from wholly Polish to partly Polish, to totally free and experimental (18).
The Hungarian Lszl Cs. Szab came to London in 1951 and worked at the
Hungarian Department of the BBC until 1972. Zoltn Szab moved from Paris
to London in 1951, worked for Radio Free Europe there, and founded the pub-
83
lishing house Magyar Knyves Ch. Ignotus, Plczi-Horvth, and Faludy and
others who returned to Hungary after the war were finally released in 1953,
after several years of jail, torture, and hard labor, They fled to England for a second time after the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, and settled in London, together
with Gyozo Hatr, Mtys Srkzi, and other first-time exiles.
In the last decades of twentieth century, London and New York eclipsed
Paris as cultural capitals, together with Berlin, which has experienced a remarkable artistic and intellectual renaissance after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
These three cities seem now to be favored by displaced writers from all over
the world.
Munich
Next to Paris and London, Munich accommodated after World War II the
most significant exile communities from East-Central Europe, in good
measure because it became in 1949 the European seat of Radio Free Europe,
which broadcasted programs for Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria in the following decades (Borbndi Magyarok). Radio Free
Europe was secretly financed until 1971 by the CIA, and this funding supported a large number of East-Central European writers and intellectuals
over the years. The Czech program was put together by Pavel Tigrid and was
directed by Ferdinand Peroutka for a decade, starting 1951. Jan Cep worked
there (195155), as did Ivan Divis, Imrich Kruzliak (195180), and later Ota
Filip. Directors of the highly polemical emissions of the Romanian program
were Nol Bernard (195358; 196681) and Vlad Georgescu (198388); both
of them may have been killed by Ceausescus Securitate. Puddington notes
that under Bernards directorship the Romanian section was not infrequently
cited for violation of the stations strictures against vituperation and rhetorical
excess (47). A bomb targeted at the Romanian section exploded in 1981 at
the radios headquarters. Stempowski, and Wodzimierz Odojewski, who
asked for asylum in Germany in 1972, worked for the Polish program.
Though the American chief officers promised a free hand to the native
staff, conflicts were unavoidable in practice, mainly because the political
orientation of the programmers and programs were very different. The Hungarian Department, for instance, was severely criticized for its inflammatory
broadcasts during the 1956 revolution, and five staff members were dismissed
after an internal investigation. Indeed, some Hungarian staff members were
right-wing anti-communists, and this was one of the reasons why cooperation
with the Hungarian Association of Writers Abroad was short-lived.
84
Chapter I
Important parts of the broadcasting were, however, prepared and broadcasted elsewhere: several program were prepared in New York, while Monica
Lovinescus and Virgil Ieruncas Romanian programs were broadcasted from
Paris (see Camelia Craciuns article below). Sndor Mrai, who insisted on
being a free lancer rather than an employee, sent in his weekly Vasrnapi
krnika (Sunday Chronicle) from Rome (he traveled there from Naples); Albert Wass started a weekly column on American agriculture and the American
way of life once he arrived in the US in 1952.
Munich attracted many East-Central European writers and intellectuals,
and not only because it was the seat of Radio Free Europe. It also became the
seat of several journals and publishers. This is where the high-quality populist
j Lthatr (New Horizon) was edited by Jzsef Molnr with Gyula Borbndi (see John Neubauers article on the Irodalmi jsg), but Bavaria was also
where the Hungarian neo-Nazi Hdverok (Bridge Builders 194862) was published. Molnr also ran a publishing house in Munich, but the most important
one was Sndor jvrys Griff (also jvry-Griff ), which published many
original Hungarian books for instance the second editions of two books
that Sndor Mrai wrote in exile: tlet Canudosban ( Judgment in Canudos) and
San Gennaro vre (Saint Gennaros Blood) as well as foreign books translated
into Hungarian. The most important Romanian journals published in Munich
were Apozitia (197394; 2006), a yearbook of the Romanian-German Cultural Society, and the Revista Scriitorilor Romni (196290), a publication of the
Societatea Academica Romana in Rome (founded in 1957). The latter defined
its goal in the preface, as the cultivation of the autochtonous national tradition, with emphasis on folklore and religion. The European tradition was neglected (see Pfeffer).
Other European Cities

Amsterdam, a city with a long tradition of hospitability to diasporic people,
was in the 1930s the host of many German exiles and migrs. Klaus and
Erika Mann came here; Klaus edited the Die Sammlung (193335), a German
exile journal published at the Querido Verlag that Emanuel Querido opened
and the German migr publisher Fritz Landshoff ran for exiles and migrs.
Landshoff survived the war, Querido and his wife did not. The German exiles
that came to Amsterdam included the painter Max Beckmann, Anne Frank, as
well as Wolfgang Frommel, Claus Victor Bock. Manuel Goldschmidt and
others who launched journal Castrum Peregrini after the war. Compared to the
large number of German refugees, many of whom went on to London or the
85
US, very few writers, artists and intellectuals fled to the Netherlands from
East-Central Europe. When they became genuinely threatened in 193839,
the Netherlands could no longer offer them a safe heaven.
Hungarian students founded in 1951 the Mikes-Kelemen Kr in Amsterdam,
a literary and intellectual association that fulfilled an important but tenuous
role in the 1960s and 70s by bringing together Hungarians abroad with those
who remained at home (see ron Kibdi-Vargas article below). During the
1990s, the city became the temporary, and often permanent, home of a
number of ex-Yugoslav, writers, intellectuals, and artists, among them Dubravka Ugresic.
Francs Madrid needs to be mentioned, since it is here that right-wing
writers, especially from Hungary and Romania settled. The Hungarian contingent included Jzsef Nyro, Jnos Vaszary, and Lili Murti, Vaszarys wife
and a well-known actress. She became the announcer of the Hungarian
broadcasts of the Spanish National Radio (194975), while Nyro, Vaszary,
and a number of other Hungarian exiles became contributors.
The Romanian contingent in Madrid was greater and somewhat more distinguished than the Hungarian one, though equally burdened with a rightwing past. Vintila Horia, George Uscatescu, Traian Popescu, Aron Cotrus,
Pamfil Seicaru, Horia Stamatu and others moderated in exile their earlier violent anti-Semitism, emphasizing now their Christian spirituality and antiCommunism. Popescu founded with Cotrus in 1954 the pro-Legionnaire
journal Carpatii (The Carpathians) and a publishing house with the same
name. Uscatescu came to Madrid during the war, edited the journal Destin
(195172), and finally became professor of philosophy in Barcelona. Stamatu,
whom we have mentioned as a Legionnaire inmate of Buchenwald, cofounded in Madrid the journals Libertatea Romaneasca and Fapta before going
back to Freiburg. Apart from some conservative and right-wing eulogies,
little has been written about the literary and intellectual content of these
journals and about the right-wing Romanian exiles in general. One exception
is a review of Stamatus poetry, whose genesis and consequences the reviewer, Ioan Petru Culianu, brilliantly and hilariously recounts in O sansa unica
(A Unique Opportunity). Having accepted the task to review Stamatus
poetry, Culianu found that it contained, next to atrocious banalities, also
pieces whose beginning, middle, or (rarely) ending are decent or even memorable. Unfortunately, these parts never occur together in a single poem. Culianu tried to camouflage his distaste by writing, as he says, an incomprehensible review. He wanted to be gentle, since he mistakenly concluded from a
poem on Stamatus release from Buchenwald that he was a Holocaust victim.
The camouflage obviously failed:
86
Chapter I
For a time, not only I, but also several other persons received daily letters on the average
of 54 pages each containing accusations, curses, calumnies, irrepeatable insults, and the
most fantastic sexual hypotheses about me, my family, my origin, and my political
opinions. The letters contained, in addition, long confessions followed by vigorous denials, meaningless photocopies of articles in insignificant newspapers which either
praised or slandered him, photographs of the founder of the Iron Guard, and a complete
medical report which specified that, although the state of S[tamatu]s health was most
precarious, he had no reason for alarm.
[]
The word iron in one of the poems I cited unleashed on S.s part a furious defense of
45 pages against the insinuation that he had been a member of the Iron Guard. Even
stranger, however, was his idea that the word cuipearca (mushroom), contained in a poem
I cited, was another allusion to his affiliation with the extreme right and his deep veneration for the pompous German philosopher Martin Heidegger.
(Trans. Mac Linscott Ricketts)

To exonerate Madrid, we ought to add that it not host right-wing exiles
only. As we saw, the eminent Polish writer Jzef obodowski was arrested in
Spain while trying to escape to England during the war but he settled in Madrid upon his release, worked for Madrids Polish radio, translated works of
Russian and Spanish poets, and published in the journals Kultura and Wiadomosci.
Other European countries and cities also had their East-Central European
exiles and emigrants. To mention a few: Stempowski, Kristof, Vincenz, Caraion, Dusan Simko and others settled in various Swiss cities. Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski, co-founder of Kultura in Rome, lived from 1955 until his
death in 2000 in Naples (see Wodzimierz Boleckis contribution below), the
city where Mrai also resided for a number of years. In contrast to the numerous Baltic writers, only few East-Central Europeans settled in Sweden. They
include the Hungarian Gza Thinsz, the Romanian Gabriela Melinescu, and,
in the 1990s, the Serbian writer Slavenka Drakulic, who settled there through
marriage.
New York and Academia

In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, masses of Polish, Slovak, and
Hungarian immigrants arrived in Canada and the US, founding numerous social, religious, and artistic associations. There were no significant writers
among these immigrants, and the prominent East-Central European writers
who visited the New World during the first decades of the twentieth century
(e.g., Tamsi and Capek) did not stay. This changed in 193940, when many
who fled the Nazis and the war sought an overseas safe haven. The lucky few
87
who were actually admitted, often arrived after highly adventurous and circuitous journeys via Africa and Latin America. The writers who settled in New
York included the German-Czech Johannes Urzidil, the Poles Kazimierz
Wierzynski, Julian Tuwim, and Jan Lechon, as well as the Hungarian Ferenc
Molnr and the Czech Egon Hostovsky.
The postwar East-Central European immigrants to the US significantly
differed from the prewar exiles, both in their composition and in their pattern
of settling. Those who arrived in the immediate postwar years to the US and
Canada were not exiles in the strict sense of the word but mostly stateless or
displaced persons with differing political convictions. Next to Holocaust survivors, there were Polish war veterans who did not wish to return home (see
Bogusaw Wrblewskis article below), and in the following few years displaced persons arrived from European DP camps, many of whom had a rightwing past but were admitted because of the Cold War and intensified antiCommunism in the US. Among the latter were a number of Catholic Slovak
writers who supported Tisos fascist government during the war, as well as
Hungarians (e.g., Albert Wass), and Romanian nationalists (e.g., Alexander
Ronnett, a politically active anti-communist physician). Most of these gravitated to the rural and suburban towns of the Midwest rather than to New
York City, which Wass, for one, regarded as a city of sin ( Jzan 1: 164) for its
urban corruption, mostly blamed on the Jews.
New York did not profit much from the influx of such right-wing exiles,
but it welcomed East-Central European writers of a more democratic disposition, who left, mostly by their own volition, when the Stalinist regimes consolidated their power in 194749. Among these were the popular Hungarian
writer Lajos Zilahy (1947), Miksa Fenyo, a former editor of Nyugat (195370),
and the Romanian Miron Butariu, who escaped in 1947, came to New York in
1951, and moved on to Los Angeles in 1974. Sndor Mrai moved from
Naples to New York in 1952 because he was disappointed in postwar Europe.
He remained a restless nomad, moving back to Salerno in 1967, and then to
San Diego, California in 1980.
The opportunities for exile and immigrant writers significantly improved
in the US and Canada in the later 1950s, due to positions that opened at colleges and universities for writers in general and East-Central European
writers in particular. German exile scholars had already played, of course, a
crucial role at American colleges and universities prior and during World
War II. In contrast to their European counterparts, the overseas universities
had a tradition of appointing foreigners to their teaching staff. The new opportunities emerged from additional sources: writers could now profit from
the boom in 1) language and literature programs, 2) East-European area
88
Chapter I
studies programs emerging in the 1960s, 3) burgeoning creative writing programs, and 4) Jewish, Holocaust, and Cultural Studies programs that developed somewhat later. New York City and its surroundings continued to be a
favorite location of the new academic exiles. The Polish war veteran Pawe
ysek (see Bogusaw Wrblewskis article in this volume) was among the first
writers to find a place in US academia in the postwar years. He became a librarian as well as a full professor of literature at Queens College of the City
University of New York, all the while continuing to write novels in Polish.
Jerzy Kosinski, a Polish Jew, was also unknown when he arrived in 1957, at age
twenty-four. He studied with a scholarship in New York and published in
1965 his allegedly autobiographical novel The Painted Bird, which became a
huge international success, bringing him lecture offers at the top East-Coast
universities and a permanent academic appointment at the University of
Massachusetts in Amherst (where the Hungarian Tams Aczl assumed a professorship in 1966). The Polish theater critic and theorist Jan Kott who became internationally known with his Shakespeare, our Contemporary, already
published in Poland left his country legally in 1966 to lecture at Yale and
Berkeley, but decided not to return due to the crushing of the Prague Spring
and the anti-Semitic campaign in Poland. He accepted a professorship at the
State University of New York, Stony Brook (Long Island).
gnes Heller, who was deprived of her Hungarian academic positions in
1973, immigrated to Australia in 1977, and came in 1986 to the New School of
Social Research, where she was appointed Hannah Arendt Professor of Philosophy in 1988. The Romanian Norman Manea, also a Manhattan resident,
became Distinguished Professor of literature and writer-in-residence at Bard
College, in mid-state New York. All these writers and scholars, as well as the
many others exiles who found academic jobs in the US, had to master the
English language as a job requirement. Teaching became for many of them a
major impulse to start writing in English, though several of them continued to
write also in their native language.
New York attracted also non-academic writers. Ferdinand Peroutka, regarded by some as the father of Czech journalism, escaped in 1948 and lived
from 1950 permanently in New York. The Hungarian poet Jzsef Bakucz
lived after 1956 much of the time in New York. Ferenc Krmendi, who left
Hungary already in 1932, came from London to New York after the war and
was in the years 195461 the New York Director of Radio Free Europe. Pter
Halsz, a frequent contributor to the Irodalmi jsg and other Hungarian
journals, also worked intermittently for the radio station, and he published a
New York novel, Msodik Avenue (Second Avenue) in 1967. Another Pter
Halsz was ejected from Hungary with his theater group in 1976. His Squat
89
Theater became famous when it started to perform in a storefront on 23rd

Street in 1977. The Polish Janusz Gowacki, author of the international stage
success Antigone in New York (1992), fled to the US because of the Polish Martial Law in 1982. He settled in the Big Apple, though his view of the city was
not very flattering: elegant people there first go to the gym and then to yoga
to meditate about where to eat, buy or sell something. For example a Gucci
purse, a nuclear missile, a dog, an island, or crude oil (Z gowy 230; trans.
K. Jerzak).
Many writers found academic appointments elsewhere in the US. Milada
Souckov, author of modernist prose texts and member of the Prague Linguistic circle, taught between 1950 and 1973 Czech literature at Harvard University, the University of Chicago, and the University of California, Berkeley.
Elie Wiesel, who acquired international fame with his autobiographical accounts of the Holocaust, moved from Paris to New York in 1955; he became
first Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York and then
Mellon Professor at Boston University. Czesaw Miosz was appointed in
1960 Professor of Polish literature in Berkeley, while Stanisaw Baranczak
co-founder of the Workers Defense Committee (KOR) and the underground
journal Zapis became Professor at Harvard in 1981. Leopold Tyrmand, who
came to the US in 1967, first worked for the New Yorker (196771) and other
journals, and subsequently entered academia: after teaching at the State University of New York, Albany and Columbia University, he became the VicePresident of the newly founded conservative and religious Rockford College
Institute in 1976. The Czech Arnost Lustig, who fled from Prague to Israel in
1968, became Professor of Literature, Film, and Jewish Studies at the American University in Washington D.C.
When Mircea Eliade accepted in 1958 the Chair of History of Religions at
the University of Chicago, his life became further fragmented. He described
in an interview the exilic province as a decentered, ruptured world that can
find its coherence through myth and a unifying language: In exile the road
home lies through language, through dreams (Ordeal 89). But through which
language? Through a primeval one? Through his native Romanian? French?
English? In Chicago, Eliade published his major scholarly work in English,
but he regularly returned to Paris to publish memoirs and essays in French,
and he kept writing novels and short stories in his native Romanian. The issue
of language and a redeeming national myth are central to Eliades politicalphilosophic novel Pe strada Mntuleasa (The Old Man and the Bureaucrats),
begun in Paris and completed in Chicago. Its protagonist, an old school
teacher called Zaharia Farma (Zaharia Crumb), beguiles his communist interrogators with labyrinthine stories of the past. His Arabian Nights in a
90
Chapter I
Stalinistic world ensure the storytellers survival; more importantly, they retrieve a much-needed cultural-historical memory wiped out in Romania.
In the last years of his life, Eliade helped the career of his younger compatriot Ioan Petru Culianu, whom we have already mentioned. Culianu went
in 1972 from Iasi to Perugia with a fellowship and never returned. He
studied at the Catholic University of Milan (197376), taught Romanian at the
Dutch University of Groningen (197685), defended a thesis at the Sorbonne
Paris on the major Western myths of dualism in 1987, and published the same
year his most original study, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance. Eliade helped him
to come to the University of Chicago on a visiting appointment in 1986,
and Culianu returned there as Professor in the History of Christianity and the
History of Religions. His astonishing publishing record includes editing
Eliades manuscripts and completing unfinished encyclopedia projects. However, he refrained from looking too closely and openly into his mentors rightwing past.
Culianu became increasingly involved in politics. Six months before
Ceausescus fall he anticipated the death of the dictator in his fictional story
The Intervention in Jormania, while a second story of his, Free Jormania,
attributed theatricality and conspiratorial plots to his assassination and its
aftermath. Culianu scathingly attacked Romanias new regime in a series of articles in the New York exile journal Lumea Libera (Free World) and the Italian
daily Corriere della Sera. Whether his grotesque murder in a toilet of the University of Chicago on May 21 1991 was a revenge of the Legionnaires, of the
Securitate, of Romanias new leaders, or of some murky alliance between
some or all of these, remains a painful question (see Anton).
Culianus friend Andrei Codrescu, who left Romania in 1965, blended perfectly into the blooming hippy cultures of Manhattan and California, until his
cultural commentaries for the Baltimore Sun, his contributions to the National
Public Radio, and his poetry and essay volumes gained him a Distinguished
Professorship of English at Louisiana State University in New Orleans.
Home and homecoming figure prominently in Codrescus writings and
dreams (see Ksenia Polouektovas article below), but he is also thoroughly at
home in America. He writes in a brilliantly humorous style that sounds indigenous, though it provides also perspectives from abroad. Witness the
iconoclastic account of his naturalization in Born Again, part of a volume
revealingly titled In Americas Shoes (1983): I stood in the windowless womb of
the Justice Departments Immigration and Naturalization Bureau, waiting to
be born American. The Nixon-Mitchell style of impenetrable anti-terrorist
architecture resembled exactly the V.I. Stalin style of the 1950s in Eastern Europe (1).
91
Henrik Grynberg, a Polish Holocaust survivor, is among those distinguished writers who did not enter an academic career, although he acquired
an M.A. in Russian Literature at the University of California in Los Angeles
after jumping ship from the touring State Jewish Theater of Warsaw in
1967. He worked for two decades at the US Information Agency and then
turned full-time to the writing of essays, autobiographical texts, and fiction in
highly crafted Polish. He set himself the task of giving voice to those that were
murdered: my subject is those who perished in despair that no one would
speak up for them ( Judaism 131).
Toronto
Moving across the border to Canada, we find one of the richest ethnic cities of
the continent, Toronto, where half of the citys population is foreign born
(among the highest percentage in the world). Though the immigrants come
these days mostly from South- and East Asia, the city has an important East
European tradition. Most of the more than 50,000 Polish displaced persons
that Canada admitted in the years 194652 settled in Toronto and other industrial centers of Eastern Canada. Toronto was also where the famous Czech
Bata Shoe Company moved its headquarters in 1960, after the nationalization
of its operations in Czechoslovakia. The company has founded in Toronto a
Bata Shoe Museum, and has supported Trent University and its Thomas J. Bata
Library.
The immigrant writers and intellectuals gave a strong impetus to literature
and literary studies in Toronto. The Czech linguist and literary scholar Lubomr Dolezel and the Czech novelist Josef Skvorecky became professors at the
University of Toronto. Neither the Polish poet Wacaw Iwaniuk, nor the Hungarian Gyrgy Faludy were apponited at the university, but Faludy received an
honorary doctorate whereas Iwaniuk worked at the City Hall. Faludy became
a highly respected citizen of the city, and in October 2006 the small park
across from where he used to live was named after him and decorated with a
plinth of his profile. Faludy, back in Hungary by then, planned to attend but
died shortly beforehand, at the age of ninety-five.
Perhaps the best literary record of exile in Toronto is Skvoreckys Prbeh inzenyra lidskych dus (The Engineer of Human Souls), which appeared in 1977,
and won the prestigious Governor Generals Award when translated into English (1985). The title is an ironic reference to a phrase that Stalin adopted from
Yury Olesha: writers are the engineers of the human soul. Following to Toronto Danny Smiricky the writers earlier fictional alter ego in Zbabelci (The
92
Chapter I
Cowards; 1964) The Engineer is a huge and complex tapestry that weaves together the young boys experiences under Nazi occupation, his fortunes under
the communist decades, and his life in Toronto as a professor of English. The
ruptures between time levels, sites, and ideological viewpoints are formally
represented by means of a jumbled narrative chronology, variously dated
letters from everywhere that interrupt Dannys internal (first person) narration, and the use of dialects and jargons, including a highly amusing immigrant English. Danny and the other Czech immigrants love Canada but take a
somewhat condescending attitude towards the nave Canadians. Curiously,
the Czech and Canadian cosmos of the novel does not include immigrants
from the other East-Central European nations not even Slovaks.
The Toronto scenes of The Engineer portray Dannys classes, his encounters
with his students in and around his classroom (including an affair with one of
them), and scenes from Torontos migr life. Danny does not seek out the
migrs, and he suspects most Czech visitors to Canada of being agents; but
he is even further isolated from the Canadian and US students, whom he considers either nave about history and politics, or blinded by leftist ideologies.
Danny, a post-1968 exile from Prague, dislikes the Americans who fled to Canada in order to avoid being drafted during the Vietnam War, the revolutionary black communist Angela Davis, the anti-Vietnam war protesters, and the
participants of the 196869 US urban riots. One of the many scenes of confrontation (40718) brings together Danny, a Czech cello virtuoso who remained in Prague and now enjoys perks like the freedom to travel while criticizing the regime, an migr Czech girl, and her partner, an American
draft-dodger who became an eternal student. Whenever the (ex)Czechs complain about political suppression in Czechoslovakia, the draft-dodger responds, to their greatest chagrin, that things are quite similar in the US. The
shouting match almost ends in a fistfight. Dannys ironic but decidedly critical
view of the American/Canadian dissidents corresponds to the position that
Skvorecky takes in essays and public statements. It reflects also the position
of Mrai and other migr writers from East-Central Europe, though not the
worldview of an Andrei Codrescu.
In spite of its large ethnic communities and the presence of some important writers, Toronto has apparently not succeeded in establishing important
literary journals. However, several important publishing houses came about
with a broad spectrum of publications. Most important among these are the
Sixty-Eight Publishers, founded in 1972 upon the initiative of Zdena Salivarov, Skvoreckys wife and a novelist in her own right, which became the
most important Czech exile publisher and, next to the Polish Kultura, the most
distinguished exile publisher in the East-European languages.
93
Operating with modest means on a subscription basis, Sixty-Eight Publishers printed over 220 books by 1992, and accumulated a mailing list of
about 12 000. The highly impressive list of books published by the Sixty-Eight
Publishers includes some major works in Czech that won global acclaim in
translation, as well as works written by Czech authors in a foreign tongue but
retranslated by the authors themselves into Czech. Salivarov and Skvorecky
were eager to launch young talents, and though they did not publish books in
English they were interested in reaching out to non-Czech readers in North
America.
Publishing in 1985 the original Czech Nesnesiteln lehkost byt of Milan Kunderas The Unbearable Lightness of Being (French publication in 1984) was perhaps the greatest feat of Sixty-Eight Publishers, but they devoted much attention also to the younger Jir Grusa, Libuse Monkov, and Jan Novk. Grusas
Dotaznk (The Questionnaire), which had been circulating in manuscript
form in Czechoslovakia, appeared in 1978, just a year after its well-received
German version came out. Monkov published her Czech Fasda (The Facade; 1991) also after success with its German original (Die Fassade; 1987). Jan
Novks Milinovy jeep appeared with a postscript by Vclav Havel in 1989,
after the publication of the original English edition, The Willys Dream Kit
(1986) and its nomination for a Pulitzer Prize. Sixty-Eight Publishers brought
out, of course, all of Salivarovs and Skvoreckys works in Czech, including
her Hnuj zeme (1994) and Honzlov (1973), as well as his Dve legendy (1982), his
two-volume Mirkl (Miracle; 1972), and his Tankovy prapor (The Tank Corps;
1980), which sold 7000 copies.
Less known but important was Istvn Vrsvrys Hungarian VrsvryWeller printing and publishing enterprise (1963) in Toronto, which published not only in Hungarian but also in English and other languages. The
authors included Sndor Mrai, and such conservative writers and politicians
as Mikls Horthy, Jzsef Mindszenty, Imre Kovcs, and Albert Wass. In Vrsvry, Mrai found a friend as well as a publisher who was willing to bring
out regularly his works from 1970 onwards.
A Polish Toronto publisher was launched in 1978 upon the initiative of Wacaw Iwaniuk and a number of writers from the war veteran generation. The
Polski Fundusz Wydawniczy w Kanadzie (Polish-Canadian Publishing Fund),
has put out a surprisingly large number of poetry volumes, including a bilingual anthology of seven Polish-Canadian poets, edited by Iwaniuk and Florian
Smieja (1984), Bogdan Czaykowskis anthology of Polish poetry in emigration
(2002), and a volume by Andrzej Busza.
94
Chapter I
Buenos Aires
Argentina and Paraguay acquired a reputation for harboring ex-Nazis, but the
Latin American countries (including Mexico and Central America) opened
their doors also to many German and Jewish exiles fleeing Hitler, as well as to
exiles fleeing the East-Central European communist regimes. We can list here
only a few relevant cases; the tangled exile culture and politics of the continent would need comprehensive studies.
The most prominent East-Central European writer who landed in Latin
America was Witold Gombrowicz, who was on a cruiseship when the war
broke out and remained in Buenos Aires until 1963 (see Jerzy Jarzebskis article below). Gombrowicz published there, with the help of native speakers,
two unsuccessful works in Spanish, but, more importantly, he also wrote in
Buenos Aires some of his most important Polish works, including Trans-Atlantyk (Trans-Atlantic; 1953), which refocuses his view of Poland through his
first experiences in Argentina. Upon returning to Europe, he wrote in his
Diary: So that when Argentina recedes behind me, dissolves, the Europe rising before me is like a pyramid, Sphinx, and an alien planet, like a fata morgana,
no longer mine, I do not recognize it, I do not recover it in time and space (3:
143). A more general vision of Polish presence in Argentina may be found in
the novel Losy pasierbw (Fates of Foster Sons; 1958) by Florian Czarnyszewicz, who immigrated already in 1924 to Argentina. Micha Choromanski
fled to Latin America at the outbreak of the war, but went on to Canada
(19411944), and returned to Poland in 1957.
Of the right-wing writers, the mentioned Romanian Vintila Horia taught at
the Universidad de Buenos Aires between 1948 and 1953, and returned then
to Madrid. Most of the right-wing East-Central European exiles came to Buenos Aires from Hungary and Slovakia. The latter were Catholic writers who
served in various official capacities in Jozef Tisos puppet government during
World War II in the hope that Slovakia would permanently secede from the
Czechoslovak federation. Of those who fled from Slovakia, Tido Jozef Gas arnov were
par, Milo Urban (editor of the Tiso daily Gardista), and Andrej Z
captured by the Western military and returned to Czechoslovakia (Zarnov
managed to escape in 1952). Others managed to get via Austria to Italy, where
they received help from the Vatican to leave the continent. Mikuls Sprinc,
Karol Strmen, and Jn Okl entered the US, whereas, Rudolf Dilong, Stanislav Meciar, Jn E. Bor, Koloman K. Geraldini, and Jozef Cger-Hronsky (who
was almost returned by the Italian authorities to Czechoslovakia) escaped to
Buenos Aires. The city, in which a Slovensky spolok (Slovak Society) had been already in existence since the interwar period, now became a lively center of
95
Slovak literature and culture. Dilong moved in 1965 to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but the rest of them stayed. Cger-Hronsky, the most talented and active among them, founded and led in Buenos Aires the publishing house
Zahranicna Matica slovenska (Matica Slovenska Abroad). He died in Lujn in
1960, but was rehabilitated and reburied in 1993, in the Slovak national cemetery of Martin. In contrast to Gombrowicz, these Slovak writers made, apparantly, no serious efforts to contribute to Argentinas and Latin Americas
evolving modernist and postmodern literature. They continued to be preoccupied with Slovak literature, culture, and politics in the Slovak language.
The Hungarian right-wing exiles that left their home for Buenos Aires in
194445 included Gyrgy Olh, who later moved to Crdoba, the actor Antal
Pger, who directed the Hungarian Theater Company (Magyar Sznjtsz
Trsulat) between 1948 and 1954, and Zita Szelecky, a famous Hungarian actress who joined Pger on stage. Both Pger and Szelecky returned to Hungary towards the end of their lives. The poet Mrton Kerecsendi Kiss, who
wrote in the 1940s screenplays for Pger and Szelecky, lived in Buenos Aires
until 1957, and then moved to the US. Adorjn Czany, another exile of 1944,
published the paper Dlamerikai Magyarsg, later called Dlamerikai Magyar Hrlap, and he ran the publishing house Danubio (195173), which published
many of the more than two-hundred Hungarian books that appeared in Argentina between 1948 and 1968. The mentioned Toronto publisher Istvn
Vrsvry also started his publishing activities in Buenos Aires (see Kesseru)
We ought to add that Bueno Aires had a large Jewish exile and emigrant
population. It had, for instance, also a Tsentral farband fun Poylishe Yidn in Argentine (Central Association of the Polish Jews in Argentina), which (re)published works in the vanishing Yiddish language including Elie Wiesels Un di
velt hot geshvign (And the World Remained Silent; 1956), the original text of his
Night-Trilogy (Night, Dawn, and Day). Hatikva (Hope), a Hungarian language
Jewish paper, appeared in the city between 1947 and 1972.
We saw that the Salamander poets Tuwim, Wierzinski, and Lechon adventurously fled to Brazil when the war broke out. They moved on to the US,
leaving hardly a trace in Brazil. In contrast, the Romanian Stefan Baciu arrived
in Rio in 1949 and became an expert of Latin American literature, which led
him then to teach in Seattle (196264) and Honolulu. Among the few other
East-Central European writers who went to Latin America was the Polish
Czesaw Straszewicz He survived the war in France and England, and was
sent in 1944 by the Polish exile government to Montevideo, Uruguay to head
a Press Bureau there. His compatriot Teodor Parnicki was similarly made
in 1944 Cultural Attach of the Polish Exile Government in Mexico City,
just shortly before Mexico, as most other countries, stopped recognizing this
96
Chapter I
government. Parnicki remained in Mexico City, however, eking out a poor living within the Citys Polish community. He returned to Poland in 1967.
Mexico City was first and foremost a refuge for German exiles (e.g., Anna
Seghers), but it also accommodated some East-Central European writers,
among them the Prague German-Czech reportage-writer Egon Erwin Kisch.
Andrzej Bobkowski went to Guatemala after the war, while the Hungarian
Gyrgy Ferdinandy, who left his country in 1956, came to teach in Puerto
Rico in 1964.
Palestine/Israel
Israel (Palestine) was for the displaced Jews of East-Central Europe not just a
place of exile but, above all, an ancestral home to which they returned after
many centuries of exile and Diaspora. Their last exile was paradoxically and
simultaneously also a homecoming. While this was, indeed, a feeling that
many writers shared when they came to Israel from East-Central Europe, appropriating the old/new homeland was often quite difficult for them, not
only because of the new and often harsh social conditions, but, above all, because in Israel, as in the other host countries, the dominant language was different from their mother tongue, even if it was the language of their ancestors.
In this sense, they did not come home but into an alien linguistic world, which
many of them decided not to adopt; they continued to write in Polish, Hungarian, Romanian, or Czech, and, not unrelated to this, they often continued
to write obsessively about their experiences in the world they physically left
behind.
We shall not include here the early Zionist settlers, mainly because they
came from Russia and the Ukraine rather than East-Central Europe as we define it here. Some of them escaped pogroms, and should, in this sense, be regarded as exiles. We should mention, specifically, Arthur Koestler, who left
Hungary, as we saw, in 1919, and abruptly discontinued his Viennese studies
in 1926 to immigrate to Palestine. After three difficult years there, remembered in his autobiographical volume Arrow in the Blue (1952), he returned to
Europe as a journalist. Only then did his career as a travel and fiction writer
start.
A number of East-Central European Jewish writers immigrated in the
1930s to Palestine; for instance Kafkas friend, the German-Czech Max Brod,
the mentioned Polish writer Parnicki, and his compatriot Roman Brandstaetter, who returned, however, to Poland as early as 1948 after he was baptized in Rome in 1946. Leo Lipski, who arrived in 1945, portrayed in Piotrus his
97
loneliness in the new country, which he partly compensated, presumably, by

maintaining lively contacts with the Polish exile journals in Paris and London.
The exodus continued after the war, to what became Israel in 1948.
Viktor Fischl arrived from Czechoslovakia that year and assumed the new
name Avigdor Daga. He became a diplomat but continued writing. One year
after the founding of the Jewish state, two important literary figures came to
Israel: the Hungarian Ephraim Kishon [Kishont], who became an internationally celebrated satirist, not unlike his ex-countryman Gyrgy Mikes in
England. The other figure was the Slovak Leopold Lahola, a journalist, playwright, scriptwriter, and director, who made several internationally acclaimed
films. After staying for several years in Israel, he moved to various parts of
Europe before finally settling in Munich. His compatriot, the Aryan Ladislav
Mnacko, married to a Jewess, undertook in August 1967 a trip to Israel, for
which he was expelled from Czechoslovakia. He returned from Israel to Bratislava during the Prague Spring, only to leave again for Austria after the Soviet invasion.
Several other writers also stayed only shortly in Israel. The mentioned Romanian surrealist and psychoanalyst Dolfi Trost (Alexandrian 22526) went
from Israel to the US and died in Chicago, whereas his co-author Gherasim
Luca arrived in 1952 but moved on to Paris. The Polish Marek Hasko stayed
only very briefly; Zygmunt Bauman, who fled to Israel after he lost in 1968 his
university chair in Poland, had a teaching stint in Tel Aviv but then accepted a
professorship in Leeds. The Czech Holocaust-survivor Arnost Lustig stayed
in Israel only in 196869.
Among those who remained permanently in Israel, we need to mention the
Polish Holocaust survivor Ida Fink, who arrived in 1957 and continued to
write Polish novels, exclusively about the Holocaust. Stanisaw Wygodski, a
survivor of Nazi camps, arrived 1968 to Israel. The Romanian Alexandru
Sever was one of those whom Ceausescu released in exchange of a ransom in
1976. Several other Romanian Jewish writers also settled in Israel and continued to write in Romanian.
Works Cited
Alexandrian, Sarane. Le surralisme et le rve (Surrealism and Dream). Paris: Gallimard, 1974.
Anton, Ted. Eros, Magic, & the Murder of Professor Culianu. Evanston: Northwestern UP,
1996.
Balzs, Bla. Der Geist des Films (The Spirit of Film). Halle: Knapp, 1930.
Balzs, Bla. Der sichtbare Mensch, oder die Kultur des Films (The Visible Man, or the Culture of
Film). Vienna & Leipzig: Deutsch-sterreichischer Verlag, 1924.
98
Chapter I
Balzs, Bla. Istra Diaries. Unpublished manuscripts at the Hungarian Academy of

Science.
Balzs, Bla. Napl 19191922 (Diary 19191922). Vol. 2. Budapest: Magveto, 1982.
Balzs, Bla. Prizs-e vagy Weimar? (Paris or Weimar?). Nyugat 7.1617 (1914): 200203.
Balzs, Bla. Unmgliche Menschen (Impossible People). Frankfurt/M.: Rtten & Loening,
1930.
Behring, Eva, Alfrun Kliems, and Hans-Christian Trepte, ed. Grundbegriffe und Autoren ostmitteleuropischer Exilliteraturen 19451989. Ein Beitrag zur Systematisierung und Typologisierung (Basic Concepts and Authors of the East-Central European Exile Literatures,
19451989. A Contribution to their Systematization and Typology). Stuttgart: Steiner,
2004.
Benn, Gottfried. Gesammelte Werke (Collected Works). 8 vols. Wiesbaden: Limes, 1968.
Berberova, Nina. The Italics are Mine. New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1969.
Bobkowski, Andrzej. Szkice pirkiem (Sketches with a Quill). Warsaw: Cis, 2007. First
ed. Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1957. French trans. Laurence Dyevre as En guerre et en
paix journal 19401944 (In War and Peace: Journal 19401944). Paris: Noir sur blanc,
1991.
Bolecki, Wodzimierz. Ptasznik z Wilna. O Jzefie Mackiewiczu (Zarys monograficzny) (The BirdCatcher from Vilnius. On Jzef Mackiewicz. Attempt at a Monograph). 1991 [under the
pseudonym Jerzy Malewski]. Cracow: ARCANA, 2007.
Borbndi, Gyula. Magyarok az Angol kertben. A Szabad Eurpa Rdi trtnete (Hungarians in
the English Garden. History of Radio Free Europe). Budapest: Mundus, 2004.
Borbndi, Gyula. Nem ltnk hiba. Az j Lthatr ngy vtizede (We did not Live in Vain. j
Lthatrs Four Decennia). Budapest: Eurpa, 2000.
Broniewski, Wadisaw, Ryszard Stande, and Witold Wandurski. Trzy Salwy (Three Salvos).
Warsaw: authors, 1925.
Brooks-Rose, Christine. Exsul. Exile and Creativity: Singposts, Travelers, Outsiders, Backward
Glances. Ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman. Durham NC: Duke UP, 1998. 924.
Bryas, Madeleine de. Les Peuples en marche: les migrations politiques et conomiques en Europe depuis
la guerre mondiale (People on the Move: Political and Economic Migrations in Europe
since the World War). Paris: Pedone, 1926.
Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004. Trans. M. B.
DeBevoise from La rpublique mondiale des lettres. Paris: Seuil, 1999.
Carlat, Dominique. Ghrasim Luca lintempestif (Ghrasim Luca, the Untimely). Paris: Corti,
1998.
Cioran, E[mil] M. Schimbarea la fata a Romniei (The Transfiguration of Romania). Bucharest:
Vremea, 1938.
Codrescu, Andrei. In Americas Shoes. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1983.
Colin, Amy. Paul Celan. Holograms of Darkness. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1991.
Congdon, Lee. Exile and Social Thought: Hungarian Intellectuals in Germany and Austria,
19191933. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1991.
Congdon, Lee. Seeing Red: Hungarian Intellectuals in Exile and the Challenge of Communism.
De Kalb, IL: Northern Illinois UP, 2001.
Cornis-Pope, Marcel, and John Neubauer, ed. History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central
Europe. Three volumes to date. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 20042007.
Crnjanski, Milos. Roman o Londonu (A Novel about London). 1971. Belgrade: Nolit, 1987.
Culianu, Ioan Petru. Eros and Magic in the Renaissance. Trans. M. Cook. Chicago: Chicago UP,
1987.
99
Culianu, Ioan Petru. O sansa unica. Lumea libera nr. 105 (October 6, 1990). Unpublished
trans. Mac Linscott Ricketts as A Unique Opportunity. Courtesy Ted Anton (Chicago).
Czarnyszewicz, Florian. Losy pasierbw (Fates of Foster Sons). Paris: Libella, 1958.
Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet. Dialogues. Paris: Flammarion, 1977.
Dialog und Kontroverse mit Georg Lukcs. Methodenstreit deutscher sozialistischer Schriftsteller (Dialogue and Controversy with Georg Lukcs. A Methodological Debate of German Socialist Writers). Leipzig: Reclam, 1975.
Eliade, Mircea. Ordeal by Labyrinths: Conversations with Claude-Henri Roquet. Trans. Derek
Coltman. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982.
Eliade, Mircea. Pe strada Mntuleasa. Paris: Caietele Inorogului, 1968. Trans. Mary Park Stevenson as The Old Man and the Bureaucrats. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 1979.
Faludy, George. My Happy Days in Hell. Trans. Kathleen Szsz. London: Andr Deutsch,
1962. Budapest: Forever, 2002.
Fejto, Ferenc. Budapesttol Prizsig; Prizstl Budapestig (From Budapest to Paris; from Paris to
Budapest). Budapest: Kossuth, 2007.
Feuchtwanger, Lion. Exil. 1948. Berlin: Aufbau, 1957.
Gbor, Andor. Die Rechnung und andere Erzhlungen aus dem Dritten Reich (The Reckoning, and
other Stories from the Third Reich). Moscow: Genossenschaft Auslndischer Arbeiter
in der UdSSR, 1936.
Gara, Lszl, ed. Anthologie de la posie hongroise du XII sicle nos jours (Anthology of Hungarian Poetry from the Twelfth Century until Today). Paris: Seuil, 1962
Gheorghiu, Virgil Constantin. La Vingt cinquime heure (The Twenty-fifth Hour). Paris: Plon,
1956. Trans. Monique Saint-Cme [Monica Lovinescu] from the Romanian.
Gowacki, Janusz. Antygona w Nowym Jorku (Antigone in New York). Dialog (Warsaw) 1992,
vol. 10.
Gowacki, Janusz. Z gowy (Off the Top of My Head). Warsaw: Swiat Ksiazki, 2004.
Gombrowicz, Witold. Dziennik (Diary). 3 vols. Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1971.
Grusa, Jir. Dotaznk, aneb Modlitba za jedno mesto prtele. Toronto: Sixty-Eight Publishers,
1978. Trans. Peter Kussi as The Questionnaire. Prayer for a Town and a Friend. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1982.
Grynberg, Henryk. We, the Jews of Dobre. Judaism 53/20910 (Winter/Spring 2004):
12635.
Grimm, Reinhold. Innere Emigration als Lebensform (Inner Emigration as a Way of
Life). Exil und innere Emigration (Exile and Inner Emigration). Ed. Reinhold Grimm and
Jost Hermand. Frankfurt/M.: Athenum, 1972. 3173.
Halsz, Pter. Msodik Avenue (Second Avenue). Toronto: Pannonia, 1967.
Havlcek, Karel. Tyrolsk elegie (Tyrolean Elegies). 1861. Prague: Havelka, 1921.
Hay, Julius. Geboren 1900. Erinnerungen (Born in 1900. Recollections). Reinbek bei Hamburg:
Wegner, 1971.
Hay, Julius. Gott, Kaiser, Bauer (God, Emperor, Peasant). Zurich: Oprecht & Helbling, 1935.
Hay, Julius. Haben (Have). Pref. Lion Feuchtwanger. Moscow: Verlagsgenossenschaft Auslndischer Arbeiter in der UdSSR, 1938.
Heliade Radulescu, Ion. Memoires sur lhistoire de la rgnration roumaine ou sur les vnements de
1848 accomplis en Valachie (Memories of the History of the Romanian Regeneration; or,
On the Events that Occurred in Walachia in 1848). Paris: Librairie de la propagande dmocratique et sociale europenne, 1851.
Herling-Grudzinski, Gustaw. A World Apart. London: Heinemann, 1986. Trans. Joseph
Marek of the Polish Inny swiat. London: Gryf, 1953.
100
Chapter I
Hoffman, Eva. Lost in Translation. A Life in a New Language. 1989. New York etc.: Penguin,
1990.
Horia, Vintila. Dieu est n en exil. Pref. Daniel-Rops. Paris: Fayard, 1960. Trans. A. Lytton
Sells as God Was Born in Exile: Ovids Memoirs at Tomis. London: Allen & Unwin, 1961.
Ignotus, Pl. Brtnnaplm: prza dalban elbeszlve. Munich: Lthatr, 1957. Trans. as Political
Prisoner. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959.
Ills, Bla. g a Tisza (The Tisza Burns). Foreword Bla Kun. Moscow: Publisher of Foreign
Workers living in the Soviet Union, 1930 [1933!]. Budapest: Szpirodalmi, 1972.
Ills, Endre. Literaturkritik in der moskauer ungarischen Zeitschrift j Hang (Literary
Criticism in the Moscow Hungarian Journal j Hang). Wir Strmen (We Attack). Ed.
Mikls Szabolcsi. Budapest: Akadmiai, 1977.
Ioanid, Ion. Inchisoarea noastra cea de toate zilele (Our Everyday Jail). 5 vols. Bucharest: Albatros, 199196.
Ionesco, Eugne. La Cantatrice chauve (The Bald Soprano). First performance 1950. Paris:
Gallimard, 1972.
Ionesco, Eugne. Le Rhinocros. Paris: Gallimard, 1959.
Isou, Isidore. Introduction une nouvelle posie et une nouvelle musique (Introduction to a New
Poetry and a New Music). Paris: Gallimard, 1947.
Jasienski, Bruno. Je brle Paris. Paris: Flammarion, 1929.
Jelenski, Konstanty Aleksander. Anthologie de la posie polonaise (Anthology of Polish Poetry).
Paris: Seuil, 1965.
Kardi, va. A Lukcs-kr Bcsben. Magyar Filozfiai Szemle 31.3 (1987): 601611.
Kartson, Endre. Otthonok (Homes). 2 vols. Pcs: Jelenkor, 2007.
Kassk, Lajos. A l meghal, a madarak kireplnek (The Horse Dies the Birds Fly Away).
mek.oszk.hu/01400/01446/01446.htm
Kertsz, Imre. Das eigene Land (Homeland). Sinn und Form 49 (1997): 11121.
Kesseru, Judit. Szabadsgom lett a brtnm: az argentnai magyar emigrci trtnete, 19481968.
(My Freedom Became my Jail. History of the Argentinian Hungarian Emigration
19481968) Budapest: A Magyar Nyelv s Kultra Nemzetkzi Trsasga, 2003.
Kiss, Csaba G. Central European Writers about Central Europe: Introduction to a NonExistent Book of Readings. Schpflin and Wood 12536.
Kliems, Alfrun. Der Dissens und seine Literatur. Die kulturelle Resistenz im Inland. Behring, et al. 20585.
Kliems, Alfrun. Im Stummland. Zum Exilwerk von Libuse Monkov, Jir Grusa und Ota Filip.
Frankfurt/M.: Lang, 2002.
Kodly, Zoltn.. Czinka Panna balladja. Libretto Bla Balzs. First night March 15, 1948.
Koestler, Arthur. Arrival and Departure. New York: Macmillan, 1943.
Koestler, Arthur. Arrow in the Blue. An Autobiography. London: Collins. 1952.
Kolakowski, Leszek. In Praise of Exile. Robinson 18892.
Kott, Jan. Szekspir wspolczesny (Shakespeare our Contemporary). Warsaw: PIW, 1965.
Kristof, Agota. La prevue (The Proof). Paris: Seuil, 1988.
Kristof, Agota. Le grand cahier (The Notebook). Paris: Seuil, 1986.
Kristof, Agota. Le troisime mensonge (The Third Lie). Paris: Seuil, 1991.
Krleza, Miroslav. Izlet u Rusiju (An Excursion to Russia). 1926. Sarajevo: Zdravko Colic, 1973.
Kundera, Milan. Nesnesiteln lehkost byt. Toronto: Sixty-Eight Publishers, 1981. Trans Michael Henry Heim as The Unbearable Lightness of Being. New York: Harper & Row, 1984.
Lengyel, Jzsef. Noteszeibol 19551975 (From His Notebooks 19551975). Budapest: Magveto, 1989.
101
Lengyel Jzsef. Visegrdi utca (Visegrdi Street). Pref. Bla Kun (dated Moscow, January 16,
1932). Budapest: Kossuth, 1957.
Lipski, Leo. Piotrus. Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1960.
Loewy, Hanno. Bla Balzs Mrchen, Ritual und Film. Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2003.
Luca, Gherasim. Inventatorul iubirii, urmat de Parcurg imposibilul si de Moartea moarta (The Inventor of Love, followed by I Roam the Impossible, and The Death of Death). Bucharest: Editura Negarea Negatiei, 1945.
Luca, Gherasim. Lnventeur de lamour suivi de La Mort morte (The Inventor of Love; The
Death of Death). Paris: Corti, 1994.
Luca, Gherasim, and D. Trost. Dialectique de la dialectique. Message adress au mouvement surrealiste internationale (The Dialectic of Dialectic. Message Addressed to the International Surrealist Movement). 1945. Mincu, Marin. Avangarda Literara romneasca (Romanian Literary Avant-garde). Bucharest: Minerva, 1983. 62536.
Lukcs, Georg. Die Theorie des Romans (Theory of the Novel). 1916. Neuwied: Luchterhand,
1963.
Lukcs, Gyrgy. rstudk felelossge (Responsibility of the Clerks). Moscow: Publishing
House for Foreign Literature, 1944.
Lukcs, Georg. Record of a Life. An Autobiographical Sketch. Ed. Istvn Ersi, trans. Rodney
Livingstone. London: Verso, 1983.
Maciejewska, Irena, ed. & introd. Meczenstwo i zagada Zydw w zapisach literatury polskiej (Martyrdom and Annihilation of Jews in Polish Literary Works). Warsaw: Krajowa Agencja
Wydawnicza, 1988.
Mackiewicz, Jzef. Sieg der Provokation: die Phasen der Entwicklung des Kommunismus in Russland
und Polen und die Frage der deutsch-polnischen Beziehungen (The Victory of Provocation:
Phases in the Development of Communism in Russia and Poland, and the Question of
German-Polish Relations). Trans. Wolfgang Dohrmann and Artur Roland from the
Polish. Munich: Korn, 1964.
Mackiewicz, Joseph. The Katyn Wood Murders. Forew. Arthur Bliss Lane. London: Hollis &
Carter, 1951. Trans. of Katyn ungeshntes Verbrechen. Zrich: Thomas, 1949.
Mackiewicz, Josef. Widziaem na wasne oczy (I Saw it with my own Eyes). Goniec Codzienny (Wilno) no. 577 ( June 1943). Rpt. in Bolecki 24051.
Manea, Norman. The Hooligans Return: A Memoir. Trans. Angela Jianu. New York: Farrar
Straus and Giroux, 2003.
Mann, Thomas. Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus (The Making of Doctor Faustus). Amsterdam: Bermann Fischer, 1949.
Mrai, Sndor. Egy polgr vallomsai (Confessions of a Citoyen). Budapest: Pantheon, 1934.
Mrai, Sndor. tlet Canudosban ( Judgment in Canudos). Munich: jvry Griff, 1981.
First ed. Toronto: Vrsvry-Weller, 1970.
Mrai, Sndor. Napl (19581967) (Diary 19581967). Munich: jvry Griff, 1977. First
ed. author, 1968.
Mrai, Sndor. San Gennaro vre (Saint Gennaros Blood). Munich: jvry Griff, 1977.
First ed. in German as Das Wunder des San Gennaro, 1957. First Hungarian ed. author,
1965.
Marrus, Michael. The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford
UP, 1985.
Mikes, Kelemen. Trkorszgi levelek (Letters from Turkey). Ed. Istvn Kultsr. Szombathely: n.p., 1794. Trkorszgi levelek s Misszilis levelek (Letters from Turkey and Fictional Letters). Ed. Lajos Hopp. Budapest: Akadmiai, 1966.
102
Chapter I
Miosz, Czesaw. Poezje (Poems). Vol. 3. Paris: Institut Literacki, 1982.

Miosz, Czesaw. The Captive Mind. 1953. Trans. Jane Zielonko. London: Secker & Warburg,
1990.
Miosz, Czesaw. The History of Polish Literature. 2nd. ed. Berkeley etc: U of California P,
1983.
Monkov, Libuse. Die Fassade: M.N.O.P.Q. Munich: Hanser, 1987. Trans. John Woods as
The Faade: M.N.O.P.Q. New York: Knopf, 1991. Trans. Zbynek Petrcek as Fasda. Toronto: Sixty-Eight Publishers, 1991.
Monkov, Libuse. Eine Schdigung (A Damage). Berlin: Rotbuch, 1981.
Mller, Mikls. Ervin Bauer (18901938), a Martyr of Science. The Hungarian Quarterly 46
(2005): 12331.
Novk, Jan. The Willys Dream Kit. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985. Milinovy
jeep. Trans. Jaroslav Korn. Postscript Vclav Havel. Toronto: Sixty-Eight Publishers,
1989.
Nyro, Jzsef. A zld csillag (The Green Star). Youngstown: Katolikus Magyarok Vasrnapja,
1950.
Papanace, Constantin. Martiri legionari, evocari (Legionnary Martyrs Remembered). Rome:
Editura Armatolii, 1952.
Pfeffer, Anke. Die Zeitschrift RSR und ihre Funktionen im Exil (The Journal RSR and its
Functions in Exile). Rumnische Exilliteratur 19451989 und ihre Integration heute (Romanian Exile Literature 19451989 and its Integration Today). Munich: Sdosteuropa-Gesellschaft, 1999. 8189.
Piotrowski, Tadeusz. Polands Holocaust: Ethnic Strife, Collaboration with Occupying Forces and
Genocide in the Second Republic, 19181947. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998.
Puddington, Arch. Broadcasting Freedom. The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio
Liberty. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2000.
Raileanu, Petre. Gherasim Luca. Paris: Oxus, 2004.
Robinson, Marc, ed. Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile. Winchester, MA: Faber and Faber,
1994.
Ronnett, Alexander E. Romanian Nationalism: the Legionary Movement. Trans. from the Romanian Vasile C. Barsan. Chicago: Loyola UP, 1974. 2nd ed. Chicago: Romanian-American National Congress, 1995.
Russo, Alecu. Cntarea Romniei (Song of Romania). 1855. Ed. and pref. Petre Hanes. Bucharest: Minerva, 1900.
Said, Edward W. Reflections on Exile. 1984. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000. 17386.
Salivarov, Zdena. Hnuj zeme (Manure of the Earth). Toronto: Sixty-Eight Publishers, 1994.
Salivarov, Zdena. Honzlov. Toronto: Sixty-Eight Publishers, 1973.
Saunders, Frances Stonor. Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War. London:
Granta, 2000.
Schpflin, George, and Nancy Wood, ed. In Search of Central Europe. Oxford: Polity P, 1989.
Seghers, Anna. Transit. Berlin: Aufbau, 1985.
Shore, Marci. Caviar and Ashes. A Warsaw Generations Life and Death in Marxism, 19181968.
New Haven: Yale UP, 2006.
Sink, Ervin. Az t (The Road). Az t. Naplk 19161939. (The Road. Diaries 19161939).
Budapest: Akadmiai, 1990. 64152.
Sink, Ervin. Optimistk: Trtnelmi regny 1918/19-bol (Optimists: Historical Novel from
1918/19). 2 vols. 195355. Novi Sad: Forum, 1965. Budapest: Magveto, 1979.
103
Sink, Ervin. Egy regny regnye. Moszkvai napljegyzetek 19351937 (Novel of a Novel. Moscow Diary Notes 19351937). First Croatian ed. 1955. First Hungarian ed. 1961. Ed. Istvn Bosnyk. 2nd ed. Novi Sad [jvidk]: Forum, 1985.
Skvorecky, Josef. The Engineer of Human Souls. Trans. Paul Wilson. New York: Knopf, 1984.
Czech original: Prbeh inzenyra lidskych dus. Toronto: Sixty-Eight Publishers, 1985.
Skvorecky, Josef. Dve legendy (Two Legends). Toronto: Sixty-Eight Publishers, 1982.
Skvorecky, Josef. Mirkl (Miracle). 2 vols. Toronto: Sixty-Eight Publishers, 1972.
Skvorecky, Josef. Talkin Moscow Blues. Ed. Sam Solecki. New York: Ecco, 1988.
Skvorecky, Josef. Tankovy prapor (The Tank Corps). Toronto: Sixty-Eight Publishers, 1980.
Skvorecky, Josef. Zbabelci (The Cowards). Prague: Ceskoslovensky spisovatel, 1964.
Sonimski, Antoni. Moja podrz do Rosji (My Trip to Russia). 1932. Warsaw: Literackie Towarszystwo Wydawnicze, 1997.
Starn, Randolph. Contrary Commonwealth. The Theme of Exile in Medieval and Renaissance Italy.
Berkeley etc.: U of California P, 1982.
Szegedy-Maszk, Mihly. The Introduction of Communist Censorship in Hungary:
194549. History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe. Ed. Marcel Cornis-Pope
and John Neubauer. Vol. 3. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2007. 11425.
Ugresic, Dubravka. The Writer in Exile. Thank You for Not Reading. Trans. Cecilia Hawkesworth. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive P, 2003.
Vogel, David. Married Life. New York: Grove P, 1989. Trans. Dalya Bilu from the Hebrew
Haye nisu#im. 3 vols. Tel Aviv, 192930.
Wagner,
Richard. Die Aktionsgruppe Banat. Versuch einer Selbstdarstellung (The Action
Group Banat. Attempt at a Self-representation). Nachruf auf die Rumniendeutsche Literatur
(Obituary for the Romanian German Literature). Ed. Wilhelm Solms. Marburg: Hitzeroth, 1990. 12129.
Wagner, Richard. Ein Schriftsteller im kalten Krieg? (A Writer in the Cold War?). Neue
Zrcher Zeitung April 2, 2007. English trans. available on the internet at signandsight.com
on April 30, 2007)
Wankowicz, Melchior. Bitwa o Monte Cassino (The Battle of Monte Cassino). 3 vols. Rome:
Oddz. Kultury i Prasy 2 Polskiego Korpusu, 194547.
Wat, Aleksander. My Century. The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual. Foreword Czesaw Miosz.
Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. Ed. & trans. Richard Lourie from the Polish Mj Wiek.
London: Book Fund, 1977.
Wazyk, Adam. Poemat dla dorosych (A Poem for Adults). Nowa Kultura, nr. 34 (August 21, 1955).
Weber, Eugen. The Men of the Archangel. Journal of Contemporary History 1.1 (1966):
101126.
Wiesel, Elie. Un di velt hot geshvign (And the World Remained Silent). Buenos Aires: Tsentral-Farband fun Poylische Yidn in Argentine, 1956.
Zolberg, Aristide R., Astri Suhrke, and Sergio Aguayo. Escape from Violence. Conflict and the
Refugee Crisis in the Developing World. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.
Zsuffa, Joseph. Bla Balzs. The Man and the Artist. Berkeley: U of California P, 1987.
104
Chapter I
Chapter II
Exile Cultures Abroad: Publishing Ventures,
Exiles Associations, and Audiences
107
Introduction
Exile is generally regarded as a solitary experience. Yet it has become increasingly also a social one, inasmuch as the growing number of exiles and migrs
tended to advance the formation of national associations, even governments,
in exile, and they constituted a readership, which, in turn, made the publication of newspapers, journals, and books possible even if only on a limited
scale.
The following chapter brings together essays on some of the most eminent
literary journals and associations of exile. What we offer is, of course, only the
tip of an iceberg, whose underwater bulk contains thousands of less important and often ephemeral publications, which may have had, nevertheless, their
own temporal and local impacts at one point. Since we do not aspire to produce an encyclopedia or a lexicon, we refrain from burdening our volume
with empty lists of names and titles. Nevertheless, readers will find shorter vignettes on various publishers and publications throughout the articles in this
and other sections.
Though writers in exile often utter pious words about the unity of their
national literatures, the latter were, unfortunately, divided, not only into
home and exile branches, but also into exile factions fighting each other.
The sad truth is that ideological and political differences deeply divided the
exile publications of each nation, and cooperation between journals of different nations seldom occurred, even if as in the case of Kultura, Irodalmi jsg,
and Svedectv the editors were around the corner from each other, and their
outlook was liberal.
Camelia Craciuns article on the radio broadcasts of Monica Lovinescu
concerns a new medium that was able to reach the home audience in many respects better. Waves in the ether could, in spite of jamming, cross borders
much more easily than the printed word. The radio already served effectively
during the war against Nazi Germany (starting October 1940, Thomas Mann,
for one, delivered fifty-five radio addresses to the German people over the
BBC). However, cultural and political broadcasting really came into its own
during the Cold War, when the BBC, Radio Paris, Radio Free Europe, the
Voice of America, and other radio stations started to broadcast programs for
the countries behind the Iron Curtain. These programs involved a broad
108
Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad
spectrum of writers, and as a result, internal political frictions, as well as frictions with the controlling agencies, were frequent. Still, income from these
programs provided a means of survival for many deserving writers. By the
1990s, the time of the ex-Yugoslavia wars, more personalized two-way modes
of communications developed via internet, e-mail, and, most recently, blogging.
In the Vacuum of Exile (va Forgcs)
109
In the Vacuum of Exile:

The Hungarian Activists in Vienna 19191926
va Forgcs
Among the many waves of exile throughout Hungarian history probably the
one following the defeat of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919 drained
Hungarian art and culture most. It was preceded by decades of peace, economic growth, and cultural prosperity before World War I, and a multi-faceted
development of the arts, which also laid the foundations of Modernism. The
191920 exile and emigration of a great number of Hungarian artists, philosophers, writers, emerging filmmakers, and intellectuals put an abrupt end to
the ongoing discourses and debates between the many different and often
conflicting views and tendencies. One of these was the budding avant-gardes
conflict with the leading modernist forum, the journal Nyugat (190841). The
sharp exchange between the proletarian free-verse poet Lajos Kassk and the
erudite poet Mihly Babits in 1916 was an unusually articulate verbal duel
about just how much radicalism and destruction of the classical forms could
be accepted or tolerated in modern Hungarian poetry (see Forgcs, Dada in
Hungary esp. 6667). The continuation of this debate would have certainly
helped to hammer out opposing but equally relevant views on poetic forms
and modernity in Hungarian literature. The post-1919 decimation of Hungarian Modernism put an end to all such debates, and the prospect of a multifaceted and multi-polar new culture of political and stylistic diversity with ongoing dialogues and debates between the many different groups and voices
faded away. By the time some of the exiles returned to Hungary after a 1926
general amnesty, they found that hardly any room was left for the kind of
avant-garde practices they had known prior to August 1919.
Shaken by World War I, the ensuing October 1918 revolution, the inadequacy of Count Mihly Krolyis coalition government that emerged out of
that revolution, and driven by a desire for social justice, almost the entire
Hungarian intelligentsia participated is some way in the Commune. Few of
them became communists by making a full ideological commitment like philosopher Gyrgy [Georg] Lukcs who converted to Bolshevism at the end of
1918, and served as Vice Commissar of Public Education during the Com-
110
mune, a position so that Lukcs became de facto the Commissar (Congdon,

36). Many were self-conscious socialists like Lajos Kassk and most of his
group; others were liberals as Oszkr Jszi and his circle around the periodical
Huszadik Szzad (Twentieth Century), championing sociology; Jszi had reservations with regard to the communist dictatorship but felt that the time
for action rather than theorizing had come. Many young artists, poets, and
thinkers had not been committed to any political party or social organization,
but enthusiastically plunged in various educational activities in order to be of
use to the poor. In 1919 the word Communist had no Stalinist connotations,
as it resonated positively with the young idealists and radicals in post-WorldWar-I Budapest. Some of the artists exhibited their paintings during the Commune and a few of them designed political posters. Such activities stamped
them as dangerous communists or fellow travelers in the eyes of the retaliating regime of Admiral Horthy, and they had to leave the country for fear of
imprisonment or worse. In the wake of the Communes defeat, special commandos were sent out to sift through villages and farms to find communists in
the hiding. Some of those who emigrated did not have to fear punishment,
but simply did not wish to live under the new rule, which promised to eradicate even the vestiges of socialist and communist ideas, and free thinking in
general. Many had to run for their lives in disguise (as poet Bla Balzs who
wore a fake moustache), or smuggle themselves out under the protection of
the night, as Kassk.
Vienna was the first stop for all migrs. Many traveled further West, to the
cosmopolitan cultural metropolis Berlin where a sizeable Hungarian group of
artists and art critics settled, or went later on to London (as painter and sculptor Lszl Pri did, after his Berlin years), Amsterdam (where painter Dezso
Korniss spent several years), Moscow (where former Ma members Bla Uitz,
Jnos Mcza, Sndor Barta, and Erzsi jvri immigrated and a contingent of
Hungarian architects including Istvn Sebok and Tibor Weiner), and the
United States (where, among others, former Bauhaus members Marcel
Breuer, Andor Weininger, Lszl Moholy-Nagy ended up). In the 1920s and
the early 30s about thirty Hungarian-language periodicals were published in
Vienna (some of them short-lived), reflecting the structure of the pre-1919
intellectual and political scene in Hungary (Derky, Vienna 166).
migrs in Vienna did not feel completely safe. They feared the agents of
the Hungarian secret service and wondered whether the Austrian police protected them or cooperated with the Hungarian authorities. Hence they tried
to keep a low profile. In December 1919 Balzs noted that his friend Lukcs
looked heart wrenching. His face sunken, he is pale, nervous and sad. He is
being watched and followed in the streets; he walks around with a gun in his
111
pocket because he has good reason to fear that he might get kidnapped. In
Budapest he is accused of instigating murder, on nine counts (entry on December 4, 1919; Napl 2: 35859). Balzs himself moved to Schloss Waisnix.
He did not fear the kind of danger Lukcs was in, but reflected on his new
situation in terms of having become an obvious outsider, as if making his previously covered outsider position legitimate: The question is this: have I
been exiled when I ran abroad, or have I arrived home? [] The aura of the
far-away, the feeling of foreignness gnawed at me already in my childhood
like some kind of reversed home-sickness. From the Hungarian foreignness where I was not understood and was scorned as a stranger I have, by all
means, come home to be among people who understand and recognize me instantly. Still, what hurts? (Napl 2: 35859).
Balzss musings point to one of the central issues of the post-1919 Hungarian exile: most of the migrs had ethnic, religious, or class backgrounds
that had set them apart of what had been considered mainstream Hungarian
culture for at least a decade or a decade and a half before they actually left
Hungary. But they were the emerging intellectuals. The group around Lukcs
and Balzs included mostly upper class Jews who wanted to raise Hungarian
culture to a higher level, whereas the members of Kassks circle were mostly
working class or lower middle class poets and artists, some of them also of
Jewish background, who gave voice to a segment of the population that had
not appeared on the intellectual scene before. Their exodus deprived Hungary of most of the next generation progressive modernists.
In his Weimar Culture, the Outsider as Insider Peter Gay describes the Weimar
Republic as a culture of outsiders, either because the prominent representatives of the culture were ethnically not German or because their views differed from the traditional, mainstream majority outlook. The outsider/insider
dichotomy is particularly suitable because it reflects the constantly shifting
criteria of both: the nation is a community that is the arbiter of its own definition and it creates an ever-changing consensus on who is in and who is not.
In an age of nation-states, political views and views on a nation or nationalism in general were hardly separable, particularly at the time of World War I,
when nations were pitted against nations and an internationalist attitude was
tantamount to disloyalty to everything the word fatherland entailed. The
emotional impact of patriotism was not only high it was exalted to an ethical
standard that denied legitimacy to groups and individuals who were not considered a genuine, historic part of the nation or who proved themselves unpatriotic by showing pacifism and internationalism.
The artists and intellectuals who went into exile after the August 1919 defeat of the Hungarian Commune were also outsiders in Peter Gays use of the
112
term. They were Jews or socialists and/or communists coming from the
working class, who sought to establish an international network of solidarity
and a network with artists and thinkers who occupied similar outsider positions in their respective countries. The international republic of the avantgarde was, with few exceptions like the Bauhaus in Germany, an extremely
thin network of outsiders that most of the insiders of the European national
cultures did not even notice, or dismissed as extravagant and insignificant.
Lukcs and his friends, mostly assimilated Budapest Jews, formed in 1915
the Sunday Circle, a loose, by invitation-only group consisting of idealists seeking to graft German idealism and philosophical thinking onto Hungarian culture. Already their earliest publications were criticized for cultivating abstract
thinking in the German and Viennese tradition, which was considered alien to
Hungarian clarity and tenacity. They were also reproached for not using correct Hungarian style and grammar.
Reviewing Lukcss volume of essays A llek s a formk (The Soul and the
Forms; 1910) Elemr Kutasi wrote in the Huszadik Szzad: One would
never have thought that in our Hungarian language, a language made for concrete tangibility, the unambiguous, crystal-clear language of Jnos Arany, it
was possible to write a book so lost in obscure incomprehensibility, so inflated with tortuous, bloodless abstractions as that of Gyrgy Lukcs. (qtd.
in Congdon, Lukcs 53.) The leading poet and essay writer Mihly Babits,
who was also the highest authority in literary criticism, remarked in his review of the book that Lukcs wrote with the sense of superiority of an
author who does not write for everyone but for the small group of the likeminded only [] introducing writers who are completely unknown to the
Hungarian public (Babits 1563). He praised the author for the subtlety of
his ideas, but pointed out that Lukcss orientation and education was typically German, or rather Viennese: the writers he discusses are [] either
Viennese or presently fashionable in Vienna. [] And finally the style as
subtle, as obscure, as abstract, and as German as the whole book (Babits
1564). As elsewhere in Hungarian art and literary criticism, fashionable has
a derogative sense here, meaning something superficial, cosmopolitan, and
hype.
This rejection touched sensitive chords, since Lukcs and his friends were
good Bildungsbrger, dedicated to fostering a great Hungarian cultural Renaissance, of which they were intent to be not only part but founders and leaders.
Lukcs responded to Babits by justifying the existence of a philosophical culture that had had no tradition in Hungary; for its development, he said, efforts
had to be made not only by the authors, but also by the readers. In the subsequent exchange, Babits accepted this but insisted that Lukcss obscurity
113
was more a matter of bad style than philosophical profundity (Congdon, Lukcs 53 and 54).
In fact, Lukcs and his friend Bla Balzs were not just bilingual: since their
mothers came from Vienna and Germany respectively, their mother tongue
was, strictly speaking, German. They read and wrote in German as fluently as
in Hungarian. Both of them attended the private seminar of the sociologist
Georg Simmel in Berlin in the early 1910s, and though they were rooted in
Budapest, expecting to contribute to a great new Hungarian culture, they cultivated academic and other relationships in Austria and Germany, anticipating
an international career. Lukcs spent a long time in Heidelberg and expected
to get a professorship at the University there. Though he lived in Budapest, he
was somewhat isolated from the most important forums of intellectual life in
his native city. He had a precarious relationship with the French-oriented Nyugat (although he occasionally published in it) because of his preference for the
German cultural tradition. He also disagreed with the other important venue,
the Huszadik Szzad, because their positivism was opposed to German metaphysical thinking.
Lajos Kassk, the leading figure of the emerging Hungarian avant-garde,
also operated in isolation from the main forums of Hungarian cultural life, albeit for different reasons. Kassk had come from a poor family in rsekjvr
(now Nov Zmky, Slovakia). He had to work very hard from his earliest
childhood to support himself and to acquire every bit of his knowledge. He
never forgot what his underprivileged youth meant. In a 1954 letter to the
writer Tibor Dry (a rather belated response to Drys open letter to him in
1937) he still felt compelled to mention that he had always suffered for not
having had at home an education for free (Dry 580 quotes almost all of
Kassks letter). He moved to Budapest at a young age, joined the Socialist
Party, and became an activist. He traveled on foot and penniless as far as Paris
and Brussels; he wrote poetry and befriended one of the editors of Nyugat,
Erno Osvt. The independent and idiosyncratic Kassk did not fit into any
existing category. He was a socialist who disagreed with the Socialist Party because of its support of the War, and he held jobs during the Hungarian Commune but strongly disagreed with the Muscovite communist leaders (Levl
Kun Blnak). Kassk argued that he was rooted in the Hungarian Social
Democratic Party and movement, while the Communes leader, Kun, had
lived in Russia and represented a radicalism that appeared foreign to him. In
his poetry he used a new kind of idiosyncratic expressive language that had no
precedent in either literary Hungarian or the vernacular (Derky, Vasbetontorony 3234). When he launched in 1915 his first periodical, A Tett (The Action),
he recruited a small group of poets and writers, and looked at German
114
examples and models that were closest to him, such as the anti-war Franz
Pfemfert, editor of Die Aktion in Berlin, and the internationalist Herwarth
Walden, editor and organizer of the gallery and publishing house Der Sturm.
This virtual connection, which soon materialized when Kassk started to sell
in his Budapest gallery the journal and the books published by Der Sturm,
demonstrated the precarious position of the avant-gardes all over Europe,
and indicated their distance from the views and attitudes of the majority in
their respective countries. These progressive groups backed each other with
their mutual contacts, exchanged publishing material and information, and
trusted that the better society they hoped for would materialize.
The pre-World War I. progressive Hungarian art world was, like the new literature, divided along the fault line between the post-impressionist Nyolcak
(The Eight) group and the expressionist Activists ( Jnos Mattis-Teutsch,
Jnos Schadl, Jzsef Nemes-Lamprth, Bla Uitz, etc.). By the time the art of
the Nyolcak was just gaining acceptance amidst a wider audience and supported by a new generation of art critics, the Kassk-led Activists came up
with a much more radical and, during the war time, politically heavily charged
anti-war Expressionism. Hungarian culture was near to becoming multilayered, accepting, if reluctantly, the parallel existence of very different concepts, trends, political outlooks, and generational specifics in art, literature,
thinking, and political views. However, it was then hit by the massive wave of
emigration after August 1919.
Interwar Vienna is often described as a boring, provincial outpost, a backwater that one had to leave behind for the cosmopolitan metropolis Berlin.
This was not quite the case though. Vienna, the capital of a very conservative
country, was governed by Social Democrats, who unfailingly won the elections from 1919 onwards and kept modernity and a rich cultural life alive. As
historian Edward Timms writes: the intellectual climate in Red Vienna []
during the 1920s can be pictured as a network of circles suspended between
the competing ideological poles of socialist-democratic and Christian-socialist views (105). It was a city of coffee houses, publishing hoses, music,
criticism, art, and grand social life that few emigrants could, however, penetrate, because lack of connections or sophistication excluded them from the
literary and musical salons of the Vienna elite, while being foreigners and
modernist-progressives excluded them from the conservative-nationalist and
the Pan-German circles.
Each Hungarian group of intellectuals had its headquarters in a different
Vienna caf. Lukcs, Balzs, and their old Sunday Circle friends Anna Lesznai
and Tibor Gergely, met in the Atlantis Caf on Schwarzenberg Platz or the
115
Schloss Caf near Park Schnbrunn, occasionally joined by the communist

Jeno Landler, former General of the Hungarian Communes Red Army, Jzsef Rvai, former editor of the Communes Red Newspaper, the writer Tibor
Dry, as well as by the Austrian writer Maria Lazar and the composer Hanns
Eisler (Congdon, Exile 52). Aladr Komjt and Bla Uitz, the communist editors of Egysg, met in the Caf Beethoven and the Schlsselhof Caf, which
were headquarters of an international leftist crowd. The publishers of the
Bcsi Magyar jsg, Andor Nmeth, Ervin Sink, Oszkr Jszi, and their liberal
friends also went to the Atlantis Caf, although the communists and the liberals did not talk to each other. Kassks Ma circle, which was to split, met
Wednesday afternoons in the Colosseum Caf on the corner of the Whringer
Strasse and Nussdorfer Strasse (Vajda 3141). This culture of emigration was
full of tensions and it split not only between Lukcss circle and Jszi, but also
between Lukcs and the Kassk group. Their deep mutual personal dislike
and conceptual difference originated from their different outlooks, esthetics,
and cultures. Lukcs and Balzs were somewhat better connected and better
received by the local Viennese and the German culture than most other Hungarian contingents. In the Caf Stckl they had a chance to meet Robert
Musil, Alban Berg, and other prominent Viennese intellectuals and artists
(Timms 111; Congdon, Exile 101). They wrote for the Viennese, and on occasion, the Berlin left wing press. While in Vienna, Lukcs wrote History and
Class Consciousness, which was published by the communist Malik Verlag in
Berlin in 1923, and Balzs, less committed to politics, wrote there his successful book on cinema, Der sichtbare Mensch (The Visible Man). Film director
Alexander Korda and painter Aurl Bernth also lived in Vienna exile for
some time: the painters Jzsef Nemes-Lamprth and Lszl Moholy-Nagy
briefly passed through the city.
In Vienna, Kassk struggled hard to keep his journal Ma going. He and his
group the painter Bla Uitz, the writers Sndor Barta, Andor Simon, the
painter Sndor Bortnyik, the poet Erzsi jvri (Bartas wife and Kassks
sister), translator Endre Gspr and others had to start from scratch. They
were penniless. Some money came from donations, but most of it was earned
by the self-sacrificing work of Kassks wife, performer and actress Joln
Simon, who slaved as a seamstress and did other lowly jobs. Amazingly, however, Kassk was able to bring out the first, elegantly printed double issue of
the Viennese Ma as early as Mayday 1920.
He opened the new volume with a bilingual appeal, An die Knstler aller
Lnder (To the Artists of all Countries), expressing his faith in a world revolution and the collective individual, which remained the eternal object of desire and struggle. On the back cover, the entire group signed as the Hungar-
116
ian Activists a short communiqu in which they stated that the new
Christian-conservative regime in Hungary cannot beat the new culture to
death and that writers and poets will keep on expressing themselves even if
they have to use pseudonyms or fictitious initials as pen-names. They also announced the establishment of an account and requested donations.
The next issue included Kassks Letter to the Young Workers in Hungary! a passionate but also strategic manifesto addressed to the clearheaded twenty-year-old who alone are entitled to practice the dictatorship
of the idea. Kassk explained that proletarian dictatorship is incompatible
with a workers democracy, and he put his hope in the young generation that,
he believed, was the sole carrier of the eternal revolution. These emotionally
charged but half-baked ideas were expressed in a heated expressionist language of pathos, political demagogy, and poetry. The programmatic articles,
above all those of Jnos Mcza on the proletarian theater (Rszlet and
Sznpad), appeared to deny the defeat of the revolution and outlined a cultural life during a coming proletarian dictatorship.
Many literary pieces of the first Vienna issues of Ma carried expressionist
accounts of the revolution, based on memory and imagination. Kassks 1919
posz (The Epic of 1919), Sndor Bartas Akasztott ember (Hanged Man), Erzsi
Ujvris Prza 17 (Prose 17), and other pieces conveyed a utopian revolutionary faith and a desperate compassion with those who had been brutally victimized back in Hungary. The most significant poem among these was Kassks Mglyk nekelnek (The Bonfires Are Singing), which was also published
in a volume of poems with the same title. This book was smuggled to Budapest by Joln Simon on one of her clandestine trips, and reviewed in Nyugat by
Lorinc Szab, in a tone that differed greatly from the one previously used
with regard to Kassk, who occasionally published in Nyugat but obviously
did not belong to its core authors. Though neither Kassks radical, expressive
language nor his political views were acceptable for Szab, he pointed out
that this book will not be banned for ever in Hungary, and he highly praised
its vitality. It appears that the changed political and cultural situation in Hungary and the dominant arch-conservatism of the 1920s sensitized Szab to alternative voices, including the avant-garde. While he kept repeating that he
had never liked Kassks writing and political views, he now he acknowledged
that Kassks unusual book, which he called a piece of prose, consisting of
100 or 200 poems was a gigantic effort to embrace the whole flow of life, including harshness, filth, and a rough sense of beauty. For this, it was better
and more valuable than harping on the beauties of life.
Szabs review touched on a neuralgic point of Hungarian culture: the tradition of exile after defeated wars of independence and the subsequent cultural
117
ice age. In 1711, the leader of the anti-Habsburg war, Ferenc Rkczi, went
into Turkish exile with his closest combatants; several leaders of the defeated
184849 revolution and war of independence, including Lajos Kossuth, chose
exile. Records are scarce about the common participants of these wars, but we
know that many of them either went into hiding within the country or escaped
from it. After the defeat of the Commune, the question of going into exile or
remaining in Hungary became central not only for the leaders but for most of
those who could be accused of any kind of participation in the Commune.
Szab, a poet who remained in Hungary, felt compelled to comment on this
issue by mentioning that Kassks book was written and published in exile. He
also had to blunt the political edge of the book, shifting emphasis to its poetic
value, and had to justify the standpoint of those who chose not to leave the
country. The way Kassk sees the events is as correct as it is wrong, he
wrote. All members of the emigration have this same perspective. What is important though is that on every page of this book there is more life and poetry
than in the entire anemic Academy (Nyugat 552; JV 321).
The January 1921 issue of Ma marked a turning point, as Kassk shifted
focus from the Hungarian tragedy and embraced one of the most important
contemporary international tendencies: Dada. With his picture-poem (his
own term) on the front page, the January 1, 1921 issue of Ma carried a Dada
manifesto by Sndor Barta, titled the Zldfeju ember (The Green-headed Man),
essays on and by Kurt Schwitters, a poem by Schwitters, and poems by Mas
authors that blended Expressionism and Dada. The next issue, of February 15, gave an account of Mas Russian Evening, at which the invited young
Russian journalist Konstantin Umansky gave a talk and slide show about the
new art in Soviet Russia. Kassk and others in the audience discovered this
way Malevich, Rodchenko, Tatlin, and many other Russian artists who represented new tendencies, created abstract works, and an entirely new communist avant-garde art that was diametrically opposed to what Uitz, author of the
account, rejected as conservative proletcult. Ma stepped up against bourgeois conservatism as well as the budding communist populism in art, thus
representing a unique kind of socialist attitude that had never been accepted
by any established political party in Hungarian politics.
The politics of non-partisan progressive leftism was sustainable only in the
vacuum of exile, where no pragmatic steps or compromises and other maneuvers and adjustments had to be made. The absence of an actual, live political context opened up the realm of utopian thinking at a time when social utopias were thriving all over Europe, from Moscow to Berlin.
It was this political intransigence and increasingly utopian outlook that
helped Kassk find his kin spirits in an also increasingly utopian European
118
avant-garde. He reached out to the Dutch avant-garde, published Tactilisme, one of Marinettis Futurist Manifestos (Ma 6.7 [1921]: 9192), and in
the same issue also reproductions of George Groszs drawings, as well as
translations of poems by Iwan Goll and the Dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck
(Ma 6.7 [1921]: 94 and 98), along with samples of French and Italian avantgarde literature. He also established contacts with German and Hungarian
authors living in Berlin. Kassk published in Ma the article Vilgkp
(Worldview) on the art of the revolutionary proletariat, which was signed by
the Dutch Group of Activists, a drawing by Lszl Moholy-Nagy, Iwan
Golls Archipenko, and Erich Mhsams Az intellektuelek (The Intellectuals). Most importantly, Kassk engaged as a regular contributor the art critic
Erno (Ernst) Kllai, who had just immigrated to Berlin from Budapest and
used, for a few months, the penname Pter Mtys.
Kllai was a major gain for Ma, since he had a clear and well informed overview of the international art scene, and was in the middle of the new cultural
capital of Europe, dizzying and cosmopolitan Berlin. What is more, he was
able to sort out the many new trends in art and thought that circulated in the
German capital, and conveyed the energy, expectations, and cultural complexity of the city.
In 192021 Berlin was still chaotic. The grasp of the Social Democrats on
power was far from recognized, let alone accepted by society as a whole. Revanchist nationalism as well as the Spartakist legacy of Karl Liebknecht and
Rosa Luxemburg lingered, so did faith among leftist intellectuals that an imminent world revolution would bring global victory for Communism. The
progressive artists community was much more ready to embrace Communism in Berlin than in Vienna.
Kllais major contribution to Ma was the early understanding of the significance and relevance of Russian Constructivism. The Hungarians in Berlin
had first-hand information of this development from Moscow, because the
Berlin-based Hungarian art critic of the communist Rote Fahne, Alfrd Kemny, visited in December 1921 the Moscow INkHUK (the Institute of Artistic Culture), where Constructivism was launched a few months earlier. He
gave a detailed account of it to his compatriots in Berlin (Botar 9097). Kllai
had already described prior to this the new, postwar European art scene as
having put Expressionism behind and ready for a new synthesis and new
style in society, world view, and art (Mtys Pter 115). He called the new
style Objectivism, describing, thereby Constructivism, as it were, avant la
lettre. Although several Hungarian art critics were active in Berlin, Kassk
worked with Kllai only. Kemny and Pri an artist and a former actor who
had cooperated with Kassk in Budapest were on the other side of the di-
119
vide that separated socialists from communists, while Kllai was a socialist
sympathizer without commitment to any political party. Considering that
Kassk did not speak German or any other language, his achievement to integrate his journal into the international avant-garde in a very short time, full
of up-to-date and relevant information about current trends and events, was a
real tour de force. Not only did he carry drawings by the Berlin based Swedish
artist Viking Eggeling and a poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky, he also published
an informative article about the Yugoslav avant-garde movement Zenitism by
B. Tokin, one of the central figures of the group. He organized matines and
lectures, and, like Herwarth Walden with Der Sturm, he made Ma also into a
publishing house. By the end of 1921, Kassk had published seven illustrated
volumes, including Sndor Bartas Dadaist writings, his own Bildarchitektur accompanied by his own linocuts, a book with Lszl Moholy-Nagys works,
and Erzsi Ujvris prose, illustrated by George Groszs drawings (see the complete list in Ma 7.1 [1921]: 151).
Kassks espousal of Dada was provocative not only on the European
scene where Dada was controversial, but, to an even greater extent, for his
Hungarian readers. It is remarkable that although there were no Dada artworks or literature within Hungary, Dada was passionately attacked in these
years as nihilistic and destructive in Budapest, Vienna, as well as in Kolozsvr
(Cluj). Balzs in Dada (1920), Andor Nmet in Az orltek s dadaistk
(The Mad Ones and the Dadaists; 1921), Tibor Dry in Dadaizmus (1921),
Ivn Hevesy in A dadaista vilgnzet (The Dadaist Worldview; 1923) and
Aladr Tams in A halott dada (The Dead Dada; 1927) all rejected Dada.
Hevesy reviewed for the Nyugat Sndor Bartas Dadaist book, one of the Ma
publications in Vienna titled Tisztelt Hullahz, a X. Parancsolat jlnevelt hullk
szmra. Egy kiskor klto sznoklatai a forradalomrl, npszeru tancsok egygyu embereknek, boldog antolgia, csodlatos kongresszus (Highly Esteemed Morgue, the
Tenth Commandment for Well-bred Corpses, the Stump Speeches of an
Under-Age Poet about the Revolution, Popular Advice for People with
Simple Brain Cells, a Happy Anthology, Wonderful Congress). There was evident furor against Dada in Hevesys review as well as in the other articles on
Dada, regardless of whether they were written in exile or at home. They overlooked Dadas political commitment as well as its wit, humor, and other merits.
By 1922 Kassk had found Dada for a number of reasons unsatisfactory as
the tenor of his journal. Dada was frivolous and anti-authoritarian, whereas
Kassk was serious about his activity, his standing, and his journal; he established himself as an anti-authoritarian authority of the avant-garde. Although
he never excluded Dada from Ma, in 1922 he moved on to embrace Construc-
120
tivism, and his Vienna circle soon split along the Dada/Constructivism fault
line, which coincided with the divide between Communism and Social
Democracy. By 1922, Constructivism, or rather its West-European version referred to as International Constructivism, had become the emerging ersatzreligion of the international avant-garde. This shift cost Kassk the disintegration of his group: in 1922 Barta split from Ma and launched in the spirit of
the communist Berlin Dada his own journal, the Akasztott ember (Hanged
man), using George Groszs drawings and illustrations. In the following year
he launched a new journal, k (Wedge), but was unable to sustain its publication and quit Vienna with his wife Erzsi jvri to immigrate to the Soviet
Union, following Uitz, who had left for Moscow already in 1921.
Mas shift to Constructivism materialized in a series of articles by Kllai,
Kassks programmatic manifesto Picturearchitecture, his subsequent creation of constructivist paintings and drawings, and his ideological stance. International Costructivism became an umbrella term for geometric abstraction ca. 192124, a rationalist new aesthetics combined with kinetic spatial
works and pragmatic design that Kassk turned into a solemn art of redemption. For him, Constructivism spelled ultimate purity and balance: the blueprint of the utopian perfection of the coming new communist world. Kllais
series of articles gradually developed a similar concept of Constructivism,
which culminated in his 1923 Konstruktivizmus. Kllai defined the idea
here in the spirit of Kassk, as the art of the purest immanence:
[Constructivisms] collective nature is not an image of a chaotic society living for the
present. It is a striving toward absolute equilibrium and extreme purity. It imposes laws
that enter consciousness as the necessary, immanent principles of a transcendental vitality. [] The totality of these principles is structured into a system by the ideal of the
new man who is economically organized in both body and mind (8; BW 436).
This moment of perfect conceptual nirvana could not last. Both Kllai and
Kassk moved on to more pragmatic concepts and activities. Kassk kept on
publishing books, including his 1922 picture album j muvszek knyve (Book
of the New Artists), co-edited with Moholy-Nagy, and the 1926 volume of
poems, Tisztasg knyve (Book of Purity). They were reviewed in several literary journals in Budapest but the bubble of perfection they developed as
their own particular concept of Constructivism reflects the intellectual isolation in which they particularly Kassk and the Vienna group lived during
exile. For Kllai, who got increasingly involved with the Berlin art world, this
was but a brief episode. Indeed, the international avant-garde was cut off
from mainstream culture and was intellectually homeless. The Dutch avantgarde artist Theo van Doesburg and the Russian El Lissitzky captured the
sense of the vacuum surrounding the entire nomadic international avant-
121
garde by stating in 1922: Today we are standing between two worlds, one of
which does not need us, and the other of which does not yet exist (Declaration 62).
Works Cited
Babits, Mihly. A llek s a formk (The Soul and the Forms). Nyugat 3.21 (November 1,
1910): 1563.
Balzs, Bla. Dada. Bcsi Magyar jsg. November 4, 1920.
Balzs, Bla. Napl 19191922 (Diary 19191922). Vol. 2. Budapest: Magveto, 1982.
Balzs, Bla. Der sichtbare Mensch oder die Kultur des Films (The Visible Man or the Culture of
Film). Vienna: Deutsch-sterreichischer Verlag, 1924.
Barta, Sndor. Akasztott ember (Hanged Man). Ma 5.4 (1920): 38.
Barta, Sndor. Tisztelt Hullahz, a X. Parancsolat jlnevelt hullk szmra. Egy kiskor klto sznoklatai a forradalomrl, npszeru tancsok egygyu embereknek, boldog antolgia, csodlatos kongresszus (Highly Esteemed Morgue, the Tenth Commandment for Well-bred Corpses,
the Stump Speeches of an Under-Age Poet about the Revolution, Popular Advice for
People with Simple Brain Cells, a Happy Anthology, Wonderful Congress). Vienna: Ma
Publishing House, 1921.
Barta, Sndor. Zldfeju ember (The Green-headed Man). Ma 6.3 (1921): 2223 English
trans. Jnos Btki, Benson & Forgcs 32428
Bldi, Mikls and Pomogts, Bla ed. Jelzs a Vilgba. A magyar irodalmi avantgrd vlogatott
dokumentumai (Signal to the World. Sel. Documents of the Hungarian Literary Avantgarde). Budapest: Magveto, 1988. (Abbr. JV.)
Benson, Timothy O., and va Forgcs, ed. Between Worlds. A Source-book of Central European
Avant-Gardes 19101930. Cambridge, MA: MIT P with the Los Angeles County Museum
of Art, 2002. (Abbr. BW.)
Botar, Oliver. Constructivism, International Constructivism, and the Hungarian Emigration. The Hungarian Avant-Garde 19141933. Storrs: U of Connecticut & The William
Benton Museum of Art, 1987.
Congdon, Lee. Exile and Social Thought. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991.
Congdon, Lee. The Young Lukcs. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1983.
Declaration of the Faction of International Constructivists. De Stijl.4.4 (1922): 62.
Derky, Pl. Vienna. Central European Avant-Gardes: Exchange and Transformation
19101930. Ed. Timothy O. Benson. Cambridge, MA: MIT P with the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art, 2002. 16571.
Derky, Pl. A vasbetontorony kltoi (Poets of the Ferroconcrete Tower). Budapest: Argumentum, 1992.
Dry, Tibor. Itlet nincs (There is no Judgment). Budapest: Szpirodalmi, 1969.
Dry, Tibor. Dadaizmus. Nyugat 14.7 (1921): 55256
Dutch group of Activists. Vilgkp (Worldview). Ma 6.5 (1921): 5657.
Forgcs, va. Constructive Faith in Deconstruction. Dada in Hungary. Crisis and the Arts:
A History of Dada. Vol. 4: The Eastern Dada Orbit. Ed. Gerald Janecek and Toshiharu
Omuka. Gen. ed. Stephen C. Foster. New York: Hall, 1998. 6391.
Gay, Peter. Weimar Culture. The Outsider as Insider. New York: Harper & Row, 1968.
Goll, Iwan. Archipenko. Ma 6.6 (1921): 71
122
Hevesy, Ivn: A dadaista vilgnzet (The Dadaist World View). Nyugat 16.1516 (1923):
19196.
Kllai, Erno. Konstruktivizmus. Ma 8.78 (1923): n.p. English trans. Jnos Btki, Benson
and Forgcs 43536.
Kassk, Lajos. An die Knstler aller Lnder (To the Artists of all Countries). Ma 5.12
(1920): 24.
Kassk. Lajos. Tisztasg knyve (Book of Purity). 1926.
Kassk, Lajos. Levl a magyarorszgi ifjmunksokhoz (Letter to the Young Workers in
Hungary). Ma 5.3 (1920): 2324.
Kassk, Lajos. Levl Kun Blnak a muvszet nevben (Letter to Bla Kun in the Name
of the Arts). Ma 4.7 (1919): 146148. Rpt. Benson and Forgcs 23033.
Kassk, Lajos. 1919 posz (The Epic of 1919). Ma 5.3 (1920): 2736, and Ma 5.4 (1920):
4152.
Mtys, Pter [Erno Kllai]. j Muvszet (New Art). Part II. Ma 6.8 (1921): 115.
Kassk, Lajos. Mglyk nekelnek (Bonfires Sing). Vienna: Bcsi Magyar Kiad, 1920.
Kassk, Lajos, and Lszl Moholy-Nagy. j muvszek knyve (Book of New Artists). Vienna:
Fischer, 1922.
Lukcs, Georg. Trtnelem s osztlytudat (History and Class Consciousness). Berlin: Malik,
1923.
Mcza, Jnos. Rszlet a Teljes Sznpad cmu dramaturgibl (Excerpt from the Dramaturgical Study Total Stage). Ma 5.3 (1920): 1214.
Mcza, Jnos. Sznpad s propagandasznhz (Stage and Propaganda Theater) Ma 6.12
(1921): 1314.
Mtys, Pter [Erno Kllai]. j Muvszet II (New Art, Part II) Ma 6.8 (1921): 115.
Mhsam, Erich. Az intellektuelek (The Intellectuals). Ma 6.6 (1921): 83
Nmeth, Andor: Az orltek s a dadaistk (The Mad Ones and the Dadaists). Napkelet 2
(1921): 76668.
Szab, Lorinc. Kassk Lajos: Mglyk nekelnek (Lajos Kassk: Bonfires Sing) Nyugat 14.7 (April 1, 1921): 55152. Rpt. Bldi and Pomogts 321.
Tams, Aladr. A halott dada (The Dead Dada). Korunk (1927): 29597. Rpt. Bldi and
Pomogts 46870.
Timms, Edward. Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist: The Post-War Crisis and the Rise of the Swastika.
Tokin, B[osko]. Zenit, Zenitismus. Ma 6.7 (1921): 100.
jvri, Erzsi. Prza 17 (Prose 17). Ma 5.4 (1920): 38.
Vajda, Sndor. Bcsi veim Kasskkal (My Vienna Years with Kassk). Kortrsak Kassk
Lajosrl (Contemporaries about Kassk). Ed. Ilona Ills and Erno Taxner. Budapest:
PIM, 1963.
Cosmopolitans without a Polis
123
Cosmopolitans without a Polis:

Towards a Hermeneutics of the East-East Exilic
Experience (19291945)
Galin Tihanov
Introduction
Spuren eines Lebens, the memoirs of the German communist Walter Janka, relate the story of his life as an exile who fought in the Civil War in Spain, then
fled to France, and eventually reached Mexico, where he stayed over a much
longer period of time, along with other exiles who would occupy positions of
public visibility in the GDR, foremost among them Anna Seghers. Janka
himself was to rise on the East Berlin cultural scene as the director of the
Aufbau-Verlag, Lukcss main GDR publisher. His memoirs hold an important lesson pointing to exile between the World Wars as a factor shaping the
views of generations of left intellectuals on burning political issues: what
should a fair society look like, how should Communism be installed and
advanced in post-war Europe, and what was to be the place of minorities
in the new social order. Janka suggests that there was a deep-running divide
on these questions between those who spent their years of exile in countries
with an unbroken democratic tradition, or at least in countries attempting
to move away from dictatorial rule, and those who ended up in the Soviet
Union, exposed to Stalins tyranny and dogma. The former believed in a
one-state solution to the German problem; they aspired to a largely socialdemocratic form of government, and were adamant that a new Germany
must undertake to redress the injustices perpetrated on the Jews. (Thus Paul
Merker, a prominent German Communist exile in Mexico, argued that Jews
should be compensated economically even where this could not be done for
the communists and the other anti-fascists who suffered under Hitler, because the latter were persecuted for what they did, not because of who they
were; cf. Herf 5152). The Soviet-based exiles, Janka asserts, held diametrically opposed views on all these issues. They had allowed themselves to
be indoctrinated with ideas of terror and authoritarian control, and this
124
obscured their sight and their recognition of the real needs of a future democratic Germany ( Janka 198201).
Leaving aside the possibility that Jankas memoirs may well have served the
purpose of retrospectively casting his own life in terms of a continuous devotion to democracy, there is probably a grain of truth in his observations. At
the same time, he seems oblivious to the fact that many of the East-European
exiles had arrived in Stalins Moscow with an already rich, multi-layered, and
multi-coded cultural baggage, including exposure to, and active appropriation
and advancement of, democratic ideas and a humanistic Western cultural
canon. The years to follow would not erase this experience; they would transform and modify it, they would superimpose conflicting values and behavioral strategies, while at the same time preserving a core of cultural inheritance
and memory that could not disintegrate even under the severity of a one-party
dictatorial regime.
In this paper, I offer some notes on exile and emigration as factors in the
encounters of art, philosophy, cultural criticism, and political power in Soviet
Russia under Stalin. While by now we possess considerable knowledge about
emigration and exile from Eastern and Central Europe to the West in the
1920s and 1930s, we have tended to under-research and under-conceptualize
the alternative destination. Seemingly less glamorous and lastingly tainted by
the open glorification or silent acquiescence to Stalin and the purges, Moscow
as a place of emigration and exile of Left East-Central European intellectuals
in the 1930s presents a uniquely important trajectory, the study of which contributes to enriching and refining our understanding not just of the history of
international communism, but also and perhaps more importantly of the
formation of the intellectual and political elites that were to shape life in the
Eastern Bloc after 1945.
I focus on the intellectual careers of Georg Lukcs and Bla Balzs, drawing also, to a lesser extent, on the lives of Ervin Sink, Gyula Hy, Aleksander
Wat, and Bruno Jasienski, all of whom found themselves in the Soviet Union
at the end of the 1920s or in the 1930s (for a complementary account see the
introductory essay to this volume). In addition to tracing their fortunes under
Stalin, I am also concerned to reveal the implications of their long stays in the
Soviet Union for the subsequent roles they were to play in their home cultures. Do exiles ever truly come home, does the boomerang hurled by fate
across time and space ever return? And how did these men of letters negotiate
the many transitions and curves their lives took? How did they accommodate
their previous experiences and cultural codes to the new environments, in
Moscow and back home? These are the questions that inform my narrative. I
begin with a broad outline of the conditions, the hurdles, and the limitations
125
of migr life in Moscow in the 1930s, examining some of the difficulties

which exiled intellectuals in Stalins Moscow faced in constructing and asserting their cultural and political identities. I then offer a brief case study of one
of the major intellectual achievements by a Moscow exile, Georg Lukcss
book The Young Hegel, revealing the nature and the extent of Lukcss compromise with Stalinism; in the final section I examine the complex dynamics of
homecoming in the years after World War Two. Ultimately, my efforts are
steered by the need to begin to lay the foundations for a hermeneutics of the
East-East exilic experience.
1. Cosmopolitans without a Polis

The East-East exilic experience, as I term this complex texture of events,
actions, beliefs, mental dispositions, and attitudes exhibited during the long
enforced stays of left intellectuals from Eastern and Central Europe in the Soviet Union during the 1930s, carried the deeper meaning of a tirelessly pursued, yet culturally and politically frustrated cosmopolitanism. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels had famously asserted the spirit of a
proletarian cosmopolitanism that should envelop the awakening working
class and lend its emancipatory ambitions a truly global scale. Proletarian solidarity was envisaged as a world-wide network that defeats the supremacy of a
bourgeoisie profiting from an equally globalised mode of production. But by
the mid-1930s cosmopolitanism was becoming a word of denunciation in
Moscow; it was employed to stigmatize the enemy without and within the
Party, Soviet and foreign alike as a rootless agent who evades Party control
and gives the lie to the ever more vociferous propaganda of Russianness (see
Martin 99118). Cosmopolitan was often a concealed anti-Semitic qualification, reinforced by the revival of the mythology of Russian uniqueness,
and by the ongoing fight against Trotskyism. During World War II, this
line gathered momentum (in 1943, Fadeev warned in Pod znamenem marksizma
against the hypocritical sermons of groundless cosmopolitanism; qtd. in
Ronen 336), culminating after the War in the wide-ranging 1949 campaign
against cosmopolitanism (see the articles of Azadovskii and Egorov).
Instead, the official Party line promoted proletarian internationalism as a
discourse reflecting the more desirable world-wide co-operation between
various Communist parties and movements under the indisputable leadership
of the Soviet Union. Internationalism, unlike cosmopolitanism, did not erase
the boundaries between nations; it preserved a core idea of belonging, and left
intact the assumption that foreign Communists and leftist sympathizers were
126
aliens in the Soviet Union. In Stalins hands, internationalism was little more
than a smoke-screen slogan concealing the tactics of maximizing the benefits
of nation-building at a time when the Soviets were still the only country where
the revolution had triumphed. The resulting ambiguity openness towards
supporters from without, checked at the same time by a fundamental distrust
and concerted policies of control and Russification shot through and affected profoundly the life worlds of numerous East- and Central-European
Left migrs and exiles in Moscow during the 1930s.
Some of them had gone to Moscow led by ambitions to better themselves
and make it as literati and artists. Ervin Sink, for example, arrived in 1935
from Paris (and an economically precarious existence) on the recommendations of Romain Rolland, determined to find a publisher for his ill-fated
novel The Optimists; Bla Balzs set foot in Moscow in 1931, driven by the desire to shoot his best film yet; Gyula Hy ( Julius Hay) went there in 1936 from
Paris via Prague and Zurich, following an earlier invitation from Lunacharskii.
None of these three writers-intellectuals achieved their immediate goals:
Sinks novel remained unpublished until after World War II; Balzss film The
Tisza Burns was finished in 1934 but banned and never shown; Hy scattered
his energy in journalism and commissioned work (see Sink, Zsuffa, and Hay).
Others were forced into exile. The Polish-Jewish writer Aleksander Wat, in
his youth amongst the founders of the Polish Futurist movement, fled Warsaw in 1939. He was arrested by the Soviet authorities in Lww and spent
most of the time until 1946 in Kazakhstan, where he was deported after being
imprisoned in Kiev, Saratov, and Moscow. In 1941, he converted to Christianity in the Saratov prison, referring to himself henceforth as a Jew with a cross
around his neck (Wat 360). Another Polish-Jewish writer whose early work
shaped Polish Futurism, Bruno Jasienski, was twice expelled from Paris for
communist propaganda and found safe haven in Leningrad in 1929, becoming closely involved in Soviet literary and political life and enjoying huge literary success until he was arrested in Moscow in 1937 (the precise year of his
death in Vladivostok is still unclear: see Kolesnikoff 9 n. 14). Georg Lukcss
Moscow exile, from March 1933 to the end of August 1945 (with a brief spell
in Tashkent), was the result of persecution and insecurity; he had been in
Moscow in 192931, but was then sent to Germany to do illegal work and
eventually fled Berlin when Hitler came to power.
Lukcs, Balzs, Sink, Wat, Jasienski and many others had brought to Moscow their stores of rich, multi-coded cultural experience. Balzs had just finished, with Leni Riefenstahl, The Blue Light, a neo-romantic Bergfilm, for which
he wrote the script. Wat and Jasienski, as we have seen, had been shaping
forces in the Polish Futurist movement. Lukcs was steeped in Kant and
127
Hegel, possessed first-hand knowledge of Weber, Simmel, and their writings;

he had written on German, Austrian, Hungarian, English, French, Scandinavian, and Russian music, theatre, and literature, and tried to make this baggage
work for the proletarian cause after he became a communist. In Austrian
exile, he penned the so-called Blum Theses (1928), a document outlining a
strategy for the Hungarian Communist Party, soon to be discarded by the
Comintern as making too many concessions in favor of a democratic rather
than a dictatorial pathway to socialism. Lukcss line in the Blum Theses
was associated by his critics with his earlier book Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (History and Class Consciousness, 1923), hailed by some as the first work
of Western Marxism, intensely disliked by others as an act of apostasy from
the orthodoxies of Leninism (and criticized repeatedly by Lukcs himself,
especially in the 1960s).
Lukcs, of course, was not alone: he stood for a significant number of
Communists from Central and Eastern Europe, educated just before or during World War I in their home countries and in Western universities and then
spending considerable time in exile in the West, whose embrace of Communism did not mean a total abandonment of their previous intellectual inheritance. When he crossed the Soviet border in 1933, he faced the challenge of accommodating his Western and Central-European cultural baggage to the
prevalent tenets of Stalinism. It was a difficult compromise, if not exactly a
devils pact.
In Moscow, Lukcs, like so many of the other East-Central European exiles, was confronted with a pressing identity problem: was he Hungarian, Soviet, Russian, German, Jewish? Or did all these cultural codes interplay, shaping a multi-layered, flexible, yet vulnerable perspective on the surrounding
world? With reference to language, Balzss answer to these vexing questions
was recorded in his Moscow diary in January 1940: a poet without a people
and a homeland who must write in two languages and employ both without
the perfection that befits a master (qtd. in Loewy 380). Often deprived of the
opportunity to write in their Muttersprache (mother tongue), these literati felt
the loss of a more general sense of language comfort: they were bereft, to
quote Jean Paul, of a Sprachmutter (language mother). (Lukcs was here an exception confirming the rule: not being a creative writer himself, he felt much
more comfortable with German as a vehicle for his ideas.) Politically, things
were not any easier. Attempts to normalize ones precarious situation were
not always successful. Balzs arrived on an Austrian passport, applied in 1937
for a Soviet citizenship but was rejected, and became eventually a displaced person (Zsuffa 281). Lukcs confronted the Soviet officials with even greater difficulties: a Hungarian by nationality, a Soviet citizen, and for eight out of his
128
twelve years in the Soviet Union a member of the German Communist Party,
he was a Hungarian-Jewish intellectual writing mostly in German, a person
impossible to pigeonhole. Arousing suspicion all along, he could not escape
being taken into custody for two months in 1941 (see Sereda and Stykalin).
These East-European exiles cut insecure and endangered figures on the
Moscow cultural and political scene. None of them ever reached the inner
circles of power; often they were not trusted even within the narrow confines
of their professional environments, where their work was monitored, censured, and publicly attacked, not least by their Soviet peers. Eisenstein kept
Balzs at a distance (Loewy 381); Shklovskii, at the time himself a hostage to
the regime, stopped the publication of Lukcss book The Historical Novel with
a commissioned internal review (Tihanov Viktor Shklovskii). There was a
growing sense amongst these exiled intellectuals that they didnt own the
political project they had subscribed to. They were cosmopolitan in their cultural background, beliefs, and aspirations, yet they had no polis to apply their
civic ethos to, excluded as they were from the real political process. The situation was harder still for those of Jewish origin. While sometimes acknowledged, their Jewishness was often subject to salient restrictions. Balzs, for
example, conceived shortly before leaving Moscow a play, to be titled The
Wandering Jew, in which he hoped to capture his experiences of exile and emigration. Indicatively, the theatre section of the Committee on Art Affairs retitled the play to The Wanderer (Zsuffa 319).
The officially acceptable face of foreignness was associated with membership of one of the organized sections of foreign writers that functioned as
subsidiary groups of the Soviet Union of Writers, enabling the ideological
control of the exiles by the Party machine. For the Hungarian exiles in Moscow, a natural centre of gravity was the German section, as many of them had
spent considerable time in Austria or Germany, following the collapse of the
Hungarian Republic, and had written extensively in German. Since the
mid-1930s, about 35 German, Austrian, and Hungarian writers and critics
writing in German lived in the Soviet Union. Between 1933 and 1945,
430 German-language periodicals were published in the Soviet Union, with
the German Central Newspaper (Deutsche Zentral-Zeitung) reaching a print-run
of 40,000 in the 1930s (Tischler 34; Pike). Significantly, Lukcs and Balzs
both understood themselves as figures of the German literary scene in exile.
They never endeavored to master Russian to the point where they could become Russian writers (Lukcs had his works translated by Igor Satz, the one
time private secretary to Lunacharskii). Assimilation was not an option for
them, partly because they could not identify fully with Soviet culture, and
partly because of related peer pressures: Hugo Huppert, an Austrian writer in
129
Moscow exile and a translator of Maiakovskii, complained in a letter to

Boris Pasternak that Johannes R. Becher spoke with unconcealed disdain of
his (Hupperts) fluent knowledge of Russian (Huppert to Pasternak, November 22, 1940, qtd. in Unfried 128; Bruno Jasienski was the only prominent
exile to write in Russian). Given that some of the key-works of both Lukcs
and Balzs had appeared in the 1920s in German, it was far from surprising
that Balzss pride was hurt when Becher did not mention his name in a report
on exilic German literature in the influential Literaturnaia gazeta (The Literary
Newspaper). In his desire to belong (even though he was on other occasions,
as we have seen, rather hesitant about his place in either German or Hungarian letters), Balzs wrote to Becher on May 1, 1939 to remind him of his membership in the Austrian PEN Club and of having written in German for the
past twenty years: I am a German writer and feel that I will be a German
writer as long as I can move a pen (qtd. in Zsuffa 276). Similarly, Lukcs
firmly embraced the cultural canon of the Weimar Classic as a major plank of
his own identity. He took pains to reject Ilya Ehrenburgs view of the Germans as fascists and barbarians all through their history, seeking instead support in Stalins (provisional) verdict: the Hitlers come and go, the German
people remains (Lukcs, ber Stalin hinaus 21718).
This identification through language and cultural inheritance was not sufficient, however, in sheltering Lukcs, Balzs, Hy, Sndor Barta, Andor Gbor,
and many others from a deeper sense of exposure and insecurity. Seemingly,
there was an extensive support network. On paper, at least, the 1936 Soviet
Constitution provided in article 129 the right to asylum for three categories of
foreigners: those who had to leave their homeland because of defending the
interests of the working people, or because of scientific activities, or because
of national liberation struggles (qtd. in Kurella 91; on the Soviet asylum
legislation see Jarmatz et al. 2124). In reality, however, the Constitution signaled an era of rationing the right of abode. It announced the victory of the
policy of Socialism in one Country and gave a legal fillip to the processes of
russification and nation-building that had been advancing since at least 1933
(see Martin). Indeed, as Studer and Unfried have shown, the influx of political
migrs and of foreign specialist workers had reached its apogee back in 1932;
by that time ca. 10,000 political migrs had been admitted, along with ca.
42,000 foreign specialists (45). Since the early 1930s, these numbers had been
in decline, while the Party control over, and popular hostility to, foreigners
was growing. Employment provisions were also cut back at the expense of
migrs and exiles. In the summer of 1937, the Institute of World Economy
and World Politics and the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, both sheltering a significant number of migrs and exiles, made staff cuts, mostly at the expense
130
of foreign associates. In June 1938, VEGAAR (Verlagsgenossenschaft auslndischer Arbeiter in der Sowjetunion), the cooperative publisher of foreign
workers in the Soviet Union, was closed down; founded in 1931, it had employed 335 people and had published works of writers from forty countries a
year before its closure (Studer and Unfried 66).
Most crippling of all was the political and moral disorientation and loss of
identity that followed the signing of the Soviet-German Treaty of August 23,
1939, which entailed a full relinquishing of the ideas and values of antifascism
(Leonhard [78] reports that as a result of the Treaty the Left German emigr
newspapers were replaced at the Moscow Library for Foreign Literature to
his dismay by Nazi newspapers.) Lukcs, along with many others, was severely hit by this radical change in Stalins foreign policy. The new line taken
by the Soviet government was bewildering, offensive, and bitterly disappointing to him and to all those who had fled Nazi persecution and found safe
haven in Moscow. Since arriving in the Soviet Union in 1933, much of Lukcss energy (and that of his close friend Mikhail Lifshits) had been spent
thinking through and establishing the intellectual genealogy of Nazism. More
importantly, the policy of a united anti-fascist front had generated a new
brand of broader leftist humanism that went beyond the constraints of narrow class ideology and played a crucial role in leaving behind the dogmas of
vulgar-sociological approaches to culture. Literaturnyi kritik (Literary Critic),
the journal with which Lukcs was intimately associated in the 1930s, was the
main promoter of change. However, in the autumn of 1939 the journal fell
increasingly under attack, to be eventually closed down in December 1940.
Lukcs and Lifshits were accused of vulgar humanism (Loewy 387) a preposterous qualification that should be interpreted in the context of their
disdain for vulgar sociologism. At IFLI, where Lifshits taught in the 1930s,
Lev Kopelev was charged in the spring of 1941 with primitive antifascism,
a label used by Molotov to denounce communists who had remained critical
of Germany after the Treaty (see Sharapov 78). With the Nazi invasion of the
Soviet Union in June 1941, the ideological climate changed once again, but an
inestimable psychological damage had already been inflicted on those who
had flocked to the country of victorious socialism to seek protection from the
evils of fascism. In a significant way, Lukcss attempt to revive the tactics of a
united democratic front after his return to Budapest, now just one of a
number of competing blueprints for the political future of Hungary, was the
continuation of his hopes and aspirations nurtured during the years of his
Moscow exile, where the united front policies promoted, abandoned, and
then rehabilitated in swift and traumatic succession had become so indelibly
engrained in his political outlook.
131
Thus neither language, nor cultural inheritance or acquisition, nor indeed

their political creed and commitment could lend the exiles an unassailable and
self-assured identity. The efforts to (re)build ones identity and assert ones
public role were suffering the corrosive effects of a dictatorial regime, but also
those of a disheartening micro-power, displayed in its full force across the entire range of social practices. One was haunted by an atmosphere, as Lukcs
put it in hindsight, of lasting mutual mistrust, an alertness directed towards
everybody [] and a sensation of being permanently under siege (Lukcs,
Marxismus 184). In Moscow, at the heart of the world, Ervin Sink was
plagued by a sense of loneliness and uselessness (131). His Kafkaesque
story of countless encounters with the institutions of Soviet cultural life reveals the frustrations of many leftist and communist migrs who had to reconcile themselves to living in a society in which compliance and bureaucracy
had ousted the spirit of the Revolution: here the task of the revolutionary
consists in far-reaching conformism [] It is not easy to be a revolutionary in
the country where the revolution had triumphed (Sink 116; Lion Feuchtwanger, writing in response to Andr Gides Return from the U.S.S.R., tried to
justify conformism by presenting it as no more than the Soviet peoples deep
love for their country: Feuchtwanger 58). For Sink, and for many other
communists who shared his itinerary, Moscow in the mid-1930s was a city
where reality seemed to be dissolving without hope. Distrust and anonymous
opposition stood in their way; an oppressive, impervious resistance [] a resistance so incognito that I cannot seize it, as Balzs wrote in resignation
(qtd. in Zsuffa 221).
It is in this tormenting setting that we have to place, and judge to the extent
to which one might be entitled to, the involvement of Lukcs, Balzs and many
others in the purging sessions of the mid-1930s, where a repugnant witchhunting of fellow-exiles was unleashed (see e.g. Mller); in the vocal endorsement of Stalins 1936 Constitution [cf. Lukcss article Die neue Verfassung
der UdSSR und das Problem der Persnlichkeit (The New Constitution of
the USSR and the Problem of Personality) published in 1936 in Internationale
Literatur]; and in other acts of morally less than laudable conformity. Worst of
all, former friends turned foes, brothers denounced their siblings. Balzss
friendship with Lukcs and Andor Gbor collapsed in 1940, following what
Balzs believed to be a silent attack on him (he was not mentioned by name) in
Lukcss 1939 article Writer and Critic. Balzs thought to have recognized
himself (surely justifiably) in Lukcss discontent with literati who were prolific at the expense of quality, delivering to the public half-fabricated products and availing themselves here was Lukcss principal objection with
suspicious ease of different genres in order to convey the same idea (meant
132
were, according to Balzs, his drama and film script about Mozart). Balzs responded in kind: late in 1939, he disseminated a piece in which Lukcs was not
mentioned by name but everybody knew who was the literary sociologist accused of failing to recognize that the novel of montage was no proof for the
obliteration of the boundaries of genre by capitalism (all quotations from
Loewy 38489, the best exposition of the 193940 polemic between Lukcs
and Balzs). At a discussion on January 13, 1940 the editorial board of Internationale Literatur (International Literature) disapproved of Balzss paper, as it
was feared that it might add to the pressure under which Lukcss theory of
realism had already found itself after the attacks on Literaturnyi kritik were
launched in 1939. In a bitter exchange of letters, Lukcs accused Balzs of
openly supporting the Soviet assaults on him. Balzs maintained that he had
known nothing about these, except for Evgeniia Knipovichs article (Knipovich, Novaia kniga) on Lukcss book Istoriia realizma (The History of Realism), and yet at the same time he rushed to establish contact with Nikolai
Vilmont who was to denounce Lukcs and Lifshits as revisionists of Marxism-Leninism and promoters of Spengler (Viliam-Vilmont Vozvedenie).
This is just one example of many, a story even sadder for the fact that earlier
Lukcs and Balzs had sided together in the important migr debate on Expressionism. Balzs had endorsed Lukcss position with a hint that Expressionism had a negative effect on the anti-fascist emigration. He had called
post-World War I Expressionism a symptom of uprootedness that has returned to haunt the migrs as a tragic symptom (qtd. in Zsuffa 262). By 1940,
however, the trust between the philosopher and the film theorist was gone for
good; Lukcs remained hostile sometimes even nasty to Balzs also after
1945, with disappointing persistence.
Failing friendships were part and parcel of the arid landscape of exile in Stalins Moscow; even more destructive was the humiliation entailed in self-preservation at the cost of betraying a family member. A scar for life, this enforced
act of survival was a repeated occurrence in the 1930s, amongst Soviet and
exile communists alike. Since 1934, Balzss brother, Ervin Bauer, had been a
successful professor of biology at various Soviet research institutes (see Mikls Mller ). When Ervin was suddenly arrested in Leningrad in August 1937,
Balzs (born Herbert Bauer), at the time an Austrian citizen and insecure
amidst the waves of growing xenophobia, felt compelled to send a letter to the
German Section of the Comintern, stating that he always had a bad relationship with Ervin and had not been in touch with him since coming to the Soviet
Union (more on this episode see in the introductory essay to this volume).
The often unspoken tragedy of exile was amplified by political divisions
within the migr political elites and by a calculating mentality that put ones
133
career above the code of proletarian solidarity. Bla Kun disliked Lukcs,
whose Blum Theses he had severely criticized, and wouldnt support even
his requests for adequate housing; the Hungarian communist leadership in
exile remained silent when Sndor Barta, former head of the International
League of Revolutionary Writers and in 1938 still editor-in-chief of j Hang
(New Voice), was arrested and purged; Rkosi apparently intervened
(through Dimitrov) in favor of Lukcss release from Lubianka in 1941, but
the gesture was designed to prevent future embarrassment in having to return
to a post-war Hungary without one of its most prominent communist intellectuals (for evidence, see Hay 225; 263). The helplessness of the Hungarian
Communist Party in countering Stalins terror issued in almost 80 percent of
those who led the Hungarian Commune in 1919 being liquidated (Toks 261).
Against this background, it becomes clear that the space for ideological
maneuvering, for questioning the prevalent political direction, let alone for
resistance, was indeed rather limited. In the following section, I wish to address briefly Georg Lukcss most important philosophical work written in
Soviet exile, his book on the young Hegel, and to reveal its contradictory position between an innovative, even radical, interpretation of Hegels place in the
history of philosophy and a tacit glorification of Stalinism. I do so by placing
Lukcss book in the context of his desire for self-fulfillment in the rather precarious environment of the 1930s, where what looked as a public success was
often the result of a careful manipulation of the talents of intellectuals under
duress.
2. A Brief Case Study: Young Hegel and

Lukcss Options in the 1930s
The Young Hegel, probably the most seminal work Lukcs wrote in the 1930s,
never became a canonical text; it was seen by official Eastern-European
Marxism as too free and libertarian in its pronouncements, while Western
Marxists and Hegel scholars believed it to be somewhat ideologically skewed
and prejudiced, notwithstanding all its brilliance.
We know from Lukcss preface to the second German edition that the
book was completed late in the autumn of 1938 (Lukcs, The Young Hegel xi);
and Record of a Life gives the second half of the 1930s as the time when the
book was being written (Lukcs, Record 101). Kadarkay asserts that the book
goes back to a large manuscript of 1931, Thermidor: The Young and Old
Hegel, which Lukcs couldnt publish at the time (349). Lukcs does not
mention the fact that the text as yet unpublished and open to modifica-
134
tions was defended as a doctoral dissertation (doktor nauk) under the title
The Young Hegel (Molodoi Gegel) at the Institute of Philosophy of the
Soviet Academy of Sciences during Lukcss long exile in Moscow. How far
the text of the thesis overlapped with that of the book is an important question that has never been studied. Lszl Sziklai was the first to reveal that the
defense took place on December 29, 1942, with Lukcs obtaining his doctoral
certificate on August 28, 1943 (99). The viva committee was chaired by Pavel
Iudin, an important figure in the Soviet philosophical establishment, well-disposed towards Lukcs; it included, among others, the philosopher Mark Rozental, deputy editor-in-chief of Literaturnyi kritik and editor, with Iudin, of
the influential and norm-setting Concise Philosophical Dictionary (Kratkii filosofskii slovar), which had undergone by the time of Stalins death in 1953
three editions. Thus, the outcome of Lukcss public defense appears to have
been largely predetermined by the favorable distribution of power and influence on the committee. It is also significant to keep in mind that Lukcss
defence took place very (perhaps even too) soon after he had joined the staff
of the Institute of Philosophy of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Barely four
months had elapsed since his appointment at the Institute in August 1942 (cf.
Lukcss c.v. of January 23, 1945 in Sereda and Stykalin 128), and this timing
does suggest that the whole event was carefully orchestrated, issuing in a public defense without a real scholarly discussion.
Thus on the surface it all looked as a painless and straightforward promotion and public celebration of Lukcss interpretation of Hegel. Behind this
outer layer, however, an inescapable need to accommodate oneself to the imperatives of ideological life under Stalin was discernable. Lukcs was being rewarded for being used. The Hegel emerging from his book was a contemporary of Stalin from the time after Trotsky and the Trotskyite line had been
defeated, and with them also the romantic stage of the revolution. This Moscow Hegel of the 1930s was praised for doing away with revolutionary ideals
that were thought to be impeding his ability to grasp the essence of history:
Hegels very abandonment of the revolutionary ideals of his youth enabled
him [] to achieve [] a profound and true insight into the necessity of the
historical process and the methodology of history (Young Hegel 72).
This silent alignment of Hegel with Stalin no doubt amounted to an intellectual sacrifice on the part of Lukcs. Unlike other interpretations of Hegel
during the 1930s, such as Kojves lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, Lukcss reading of Hegel remained more predictable and also more inflexible
in its resolute emphasis on the happy end of Bildung and the eventual victory
of the Slave. The reason for this was all too clear: unlike Kojve, who was seen
as influential in championing a Left interpretation of Hegel that mediated be-
135
tween Marxism and Existentialism without serving any narrow political allegiances, Lukcss engagement with Hegel was shaped in no small measure by
the relentless pressures of the Party orthodoxy, which he had little choice but
to accept, having written more than a decade ago his compromising book
History and Class Consciousness and the notorious Bloom Theses. After a
spell of resilient struggle to defend his freedom as philosopher by reasserting
the main theses of History and Class Consciousness, Lukcs eventually succumbed to Stalinism. Later he reported in an interview that in Johannes R.
Bechers Moscow apartment, he, Becher, and Andor Gbor would often voice
anti-Stalinist views (Siebert 327); in the same interview he claimed that his literary criticism at the time was essentially an opposition to Stalin, especially
the article Erzhlen oder Beschreiben (Narrate or Describe). However, in a
more sober account of his relation to Stalinism, Lukcs clearly states that
throughout the 1930s he did not find it necessary to criticize or depart significantly from Stalins line (Lukcs, ber Stalin hinaus). It was this subscription to Stalinism, however refined and subtle in Lukcss execution,
which in the end compromised his chance to exercise a wider influence
through his interpretation of Hegel.
In defining Lukcss position, we have to bear in mind and to return once
again to the different course of his intellectual formation and his CentralEuropean cultural inheritance that couldnt simply vanish with his arrival in
Moscow. In a recent book-length study, Kroly Kkai has made a strong case
for Lukcs being essentially a Central-European intellectual, who turned for
solution in succession towards the West and the East, failing in both directions (23536). Lukcs did not make it into German academia; his habilitation
plans at Heidelberg were frustrated because of what Max Webers colleagues
judged to be an over-essayistic, often unruly, writing style and an insufficiently
systematic approach. Nor did he make it after all in Moscow, where he was
constantly dogged by a lingering suspicion of elitism and foreignness, which
barred his access to positions of real political and ideological power and culminated in his arrest in 1941. All this added to Lukcss predicament during
the 1930s and severely limited the choices available to him. After accepting
the Comintern criticism of History and Classs Consciousness and volunteering
self-criticism, his intellectual autonomy was substantially eroded; settling in
Moscow only aggravated this process. True to his own philosophical schooling, erudition, and talent, he endeavored to lend Stalins dogmas some sophistication and flexibility, but his work, including his book on the young Hegel,
bore all signs of a political and ideological compromise by a person eager
to attain self-fulfillment in precarious circumstances. In The Young Hegel,
this mixture of originality and dogma is particularly salient. On the one hand,
136
Lukcs defies the established Soviet interpretation of Hegel by attempting to

demonstrate that not just the mature and the late but also the young Hegel
could be grasped as a harbinger of the Marxist method; on the other hand, his
turn to Hegel bears the imprint of a reconciliation with Soviet reality and a
benevolent attention to the role of the great personality in history. Hegel had
glorified Napoleon and the terror of the French Revolution as necessary instruments of world history; he was the philosopher summoned by history to
reveal the God-like nature of the politician. In the 1930s, Lukcss approval of
Hegels glorification of Napoleon amounted in turn to a silent approval and
justification of terror, Stalin, and the Communist Party as embodiments of
reason in world history. Paradoxically, one could perhaps see behind this reconciliation with Stalin, modeled as it was on Hegels veneration of Napoleon,
a more complex motivation: not just a prudent tactical acceptance of the
political status quo, but also a residual loyalty to bourgeois individualism, to
its trust in the uniqueness of great personalities all of which is so close to
Lukcss understanding of culture as based on the canon of exclusive individual accomplishments.
Thus Lukcss reading of Hegel was ridden with contradictions reflecting
his own unstable exilic position during the 1930s, his multi-layered and
multi-coded intellectual baggage, and his controversial political experience.
He made use of, and allowed himself to be used in, the carefully orchestrated
Soviet Hegel boom that was designed and steered to endow the ruling Marxist-Leninist ideology with the grandeur of a long-reaching intellectual tradition (see Tihanov Master 26971). This scenario was to change dramatically
only a few years later, when in 1944 the Party no longer requiring Hegels
added clout of intellectual legitimacy for its doctrine, or for its Leaders standing, and certainly concerned amidst the War with populist propaganda more
than with serious philosophy declared an end to the idealization of the
German thinker (Tihanov, Revising 9495 n. 60).
3. Homecoming: The Boomerang Doesnt Always Return

My heart is defenseless because it is at home
This epigraph from Bla Balzs poem Kegyelmezzetek (Have mercy upon
me! (trans. and qtd. in Zsuffa 320), written as he was preparing to return to
Budapest in the spring of 1945, encapsulates a whole range of emotions: from
trepidation to sweet sorrow to anticipation and quiet hope. Balzs was pleading in this poem for mercy towards the prodigal son, realizing that the para-
137
mount desire to return home was making him exposed and vulnerable to the
misgivings and assaults of those who had stayed behind. Unlike Sink, who
went back to France in 1937 and then on to Yugoslavia where he settled and,
under the protection of Miroslav Krleza, rose to become a prominent cultural
figure and founding Chair of the Department of Hungarian Studies at the
new University of Novi Sad, and unlike Lukcs who seemed to hesitate between Budapest and Berlin but would have actually preferred Vienna, Balzs
headed for Hungary as his first and only choice. This, however, did not spare
him the humiliating experience of constant neglect and undermining by the
Party, even as he was at the height of his international visibility as film theorist
(throughout his Moscow time Balzs had chosen to remain a member of the
German Communist party, only joining the Hungarian Communist party in
the summer of 1945). In 1946, his anti-Nazi childrens story Heinrich beginnt den
Kampf (Heinrich Begins the Struggle) was stigmatized by the Communist
paper j Sz (New World) as harmful pro-German propaganda. The constant insinuations issued in Mtys Rkosi advising Balzs that he should not
publicly call himself a Communist, as this indents the Partys reputation
(Zsuffa 328). In the end, however strong his international reputation as film
theorist after 1945 and however independent-minded his course of action,
Balzs succumbed to Party-line platitudes, which would litter his film articles
in the last years of his career partly as a gesture of self-protection, partly because the exposure to an intellectually impoverished environment was taking
its toll.
Lukcss return and his career in Hungary were marked by deeper ambiguities. The political turn of 1989 has triggered a reappraisal of his standing
and contributions to Hungarian intellectual life; in the process, the complexities of his life after 1945 have been obscured, and a new orthodoxy of overlooking his difficult position in the ranks of the Hungarian intellect ual elite
has ousted the previous, equally unsophisticated, frame of reference.
Lukcss relocation to Budapest was anything but inevitable. When before
leaving the Soviet Union he was approached by the Hungarian Communist
Party to get once again involved with Party work in Budapest, he wrote to
Mikhail Lifshits: I had hoped for semi-retirement in Hungary and to devote
my life to scholarship, and then later to settle in Vienna [] The more I play
the politician, the less I can realize my Vienna dreams (letter of April 16,
1945; qtd. in Kadarkay 364). Lukcs had indeed been invited to live in Vienna
by his friend Ernst Fischer, the Marxist philosopher. In the end, he opted for
Hungary and arrived in Budapest at the end of August 1945, aged sixty. He
may well have meant it as no more than a temporary abode, but as both his involvement in Hungarian life and the counter-wave of enforced isolation, ne-
138
glect, and aggravation grew, he found the rest of his life inextricably entwined
with the fortunes of his country.
The foundational paradox of Lukcss life after 1945 is that while he always
enjoyed a measure of prestige and a fair share of the public spotlight, he nonetheless suffered inner isolation over prolonged periods of time. At the same
time as he was protected and offered a way of life that on the face of it bespoke privilege and material comfort, he was also left with the bitter aftertaste
of being used for party-political purposes, with his ability to resist or extricate
himself from this process declining over time. Promoted and vilified in the
same breadth, Lukcs was a hostage to forces beyond his control, a loyal soldier of his Party (at times hovering at the margins or simply excluded from it)
rather than a powerful policy-maker. The first couple of years looked all
rather propitious: Lukcs was elected a member of the provisional Hungarian
National Assembly in April 1945 while still living in Moscow; upon his return
to Budapest in August, he was appointed in November Professor of Aesthetics and Cultural Theory at the University of Budapest; and he was assigned a spacious apartment in one of the upmarket parts of Pest, overlooking
the Danube. To be sure, his election to a professorship, on the recommendation of Tivadar Thienemann, a leading Hungarian intellectual and a former
editor of Minerva, succeeded because of Lukcss credentials as a pre-eminent advocate of the German philosophy of spirit (qtd. in Ambrus 416), not
because of his work as a Marxist philosopher and literary critic. Yet Lukcs
saw as his paramount task the preservation of the continuity with his work
from the Moscow years. In a way, he was determined to revive once again a
united front policy, this time not directed against fascism but rather attempting to win over the skeptics amongst the intelligentsia, thus widening the support base of the Communist Party. That was an overriding duty, despite Lukcss personal intolerance with bourgeois and populist writers (the Party had
faired badly in the first general elections in November 1945, receiving an unimpressive 17 % of the vote, against 57 % for their rival, the Smallholders
Party; figures in Zsuffa 326). Lukcs translated the new imperative of a
united front into a vision of the unity of Hungarian literature, as the title of
one of his articles, written in 1946 and later included in his 1947 collection of
essays Irodalom s demokrcia (Literature and Democracy), suggested. The desired unity was to rest on realism as a method of creative writing best suited
to carry the values of democracy. Lukcs was adamant that this was not to
be Socialist Realism or socialist democracy; he recognized the contours
of a new historical situation after 1945, in which a new, democratic culture
was emerging all over Europe, without it being accompanied by a change in
the material basis of society, the capitalist economic order (qtd. in Ambrus
139
421). Hence Lukcss preparedness to give credit to writers in the populist camp (despite the fact that many of them were anti-Semites), heeding,
as Ambrus and Szab argue, the populists contribution to the literature of
the interwar period, and, more importantly, working towards the vital for
the time being alliance between the Communist Party and the National
Peasant Party.
Crucial in realizing the Party goal of gaining sympathy and trust amongst
wider social circles was Lukcss role as editor of Forum (the first issue appeared in September 1946), a literary journal designed to go beyond the
populist-urban divide and to draw larger numbers of the intelligentsia into
the Communist orbit. It was in the first issue of Forum that Lukcs published
the afore-mentioned programmatic article The Unity of Hungarian Literature, which asserted the unconditional approval of democracy regardless of differences in world view, in art, or in style to be the subjective
basis for the unity of Hungarian literature (qtd. in Szab 487). While it is
true that Lukcs was insensitive and even hostile towards Istvn Bibs
and Sndor Mrais calls against the erosion of democracy from the Left
(Szegedy-Maszk 11821), in the latter half of the 1940s he nonetheless remained largely committed over time, as we will see, against the grain of
Party policies to a wider view of democracy that would seek to integrate the
work of writers from different social strata and of different political colors.
It is at this significant moment that Lukcs compared the Party-committed writer to a partisan, who is neither a commander nor a soldier in a regular army, and who is entitled to retain his autonomy, including his right
to despair (a phrase for which Lukcs was later repeatedly taken to task
by the Party).
Lukcs devoted himself with unwavering energy to this new agenda of the
unity of Hungarian literature; he contributed about thirty essays to Forum.
Except for a period of time in his youth, preceding the publication of Die Seele
und die Formen (1911), and then again briefly in the second half of the
1920s, Hungarian literature had never been so central to his work. But all
these efforts were only possible in, and lasted whilst, a specific political constellation was in place. At the general elections in August 1947, a leftist alliance, in which the communists were the largest party, managed to obtain majority in Parliament. As a result, the platform of a united front was being
actively reconsidered; in 1948, a merger between the social-democrats and the
communists led to the formation of a single party, the Hungarian Working
Peoples Party. In retrospect, Lukcs judged this event to be the turning point
in the Partys assessment of his usefulness (Lukcs, ber Stalin hinaus 218;
Urbn 435). In March 1949, the Peoples Front was officially abandoned as a
140
Party line, and the peoples democracy was equated with the dictatorship of
the proletariat without soviets (qtd. in Urbn 438). A month later, Rkosi
commissioned a critique of Lukcs, to be written by the philosopher and Party
veteran Lszl Rudas. Thus the Lukcs Debate was opened, in the course
of which Lukcss literary policies, driven by the ambition to implement a
united realist front in Hungarian literature, were severely criticised. Lukcs
was also stigmatized as cosmopolitan (Stykalin 28990) and as a thinker detached from the realities of class struggle, a seeker of a false third way between capitalism and socialism. The situation was exacerbated by criticism in
Moscow from Lukcss old foe, Aleksandr Fadeev, the powerful leader of the
Soviet Union of Writers, who charged him in an article in Pravda of February 1,
1950 with disdain for contemporary Soviet literature and Socialist Realism.
These pressures led to Lukcs twice committing acts of self-criticism (the first
of these took place in 1949 and was seen by Merleau-Ponty as a betrayal of the
Marxist creed and, in hindsight, as a mistake by Lukcs himself; cf. Record
143).
Like Balzs, Lukcs continued to travel abroad, his international schedule
unaffected by the domestic strictures (in 1949, for example, Lukcs participated in a Hegel conference in Paris, where he met Merleau-Ponty, Henri Lefvre, Jean Hyppolite, Lucien Goldmann, and Roger Garaudy). In many ways,
he continued to be a privileged Party member, but that was only a faade
which the Party was careful to maintain while gradually emasculating him.
Those quick to brand Lukcs as a dictatorial presence in the years after 1945,
ought to heed the facts: Lukcs, after 1949, was reduced to a window-dressing
dignitary whose international eminence was utilized to bestow on Hungarian
communism the air of acceptability and decency, while his voice in the
country was silenced through oppressive and humiliating maneuverings. Although Lukcs was quietly rehabilitated by his seventieth birthday in 1955, the
price to pay was too high. In 1949 Lukcs had suffered a permanent and severe blow: having only recently returned from more than two decades in exile,
eager to re-immerse himself in his own culture and to leave his mark on the
topical debates of his time (regardless of his preference for Vienna as his future home), he had to abandon his studies of contemporary Hungarian literature, never again to return to the subject. An opportunity to write on his own
literature was taken away from him, denying him the chance to embrace what
he had lost during the years of exile. Thus the political watershed signaled by
the establishment in 1948 of the Hungarian Working Peoples Party was a
watershed in Lukcss intellectual life as well: he saw himself forced to give up
the hope for full reintegration through an active presence on the Hungarian
literary scene and to contend himself over the remaining twenty years of his
141
life with philosophy or with writing on Soviet and German literature. Under
the veneer of international success, after 1949 Lukcs was a foreigner in his
own culture, a situation exacerbated by Forum ceasing publication in August
1950. Lukcss brief and hapless tenure as a minister for cultural affairs in
Nagys 1956 government only came to highlight the lasting nature of his predicament. In the summer of 1960, Lukcs wrote to the Hungarian Politburo,
objecting vehemently to the isolation and marginalization imposed on him; as
a consequence, he was offered to leave Hungary for good (at the age of 75)
and settle in West Germany (Stykalin 208; early in the 1960s Lukcs was invited to a Chair at the University of Manchester: Stykalin 318 n. 88). Thus his
homecoming was never quite complete, ruptured again and again by reminders that his way of thinking and his rich intellectual baggage, informed as
they were by multiple cultural codes derived from diverse settings and traditions Austro-Hungarian, German, and Soviet rendered him a stranger in
his country. Nor was Lukcs the only one to experience estrangement at
home; in other cases, this sentiment led to more radical decisions: Hy, after
returning to Hungary in 1945, was later sentenced to six years in prison and
resettled to Ascona in Switzerland in 1965; similarly, Aleksander Wat, having
returned in 1946 to Poland, only to be subjected to persecution in 194956,
took permanent residence in Paris in 1959, where he died in 1967. The boomerang never quite returned
The reader will have noticed by now that this is not solely a piece of dispassionate research. At least as much, it has endeavored to recuperate voices
no longer heard in their full range. The passage of time and the irreversibility
of political change tend to impose their own rules of interpretation. Lukcs,
Balzs, Sink, Wat, and a myriad of other leftist exiles and migrs in Stalins
Moscow confront us with an experience that cannot be grasped unless we detach ourselves, albeit for a moment, from the habit of writing history with the
victors in mind. Resisting and failing, fighting for a cosmopolitan dream while
deprived of a polis of their own, longing for a global proletarian solidarity
while driven into anomy and isolation in the capital of the World Revolution,
losing and regaining identity as public figures and in the silence of writing,
hostages to Stalins regime and believers in ideals that defy it, only few of these
intellectuals returned home in more than a physical sense. The transformative
power of their exilic experiences was truly overwhelming: their lives were
enormously enriched but also tragically halved, the fruits of their labor left in
danger of lingering unclaimed by posterity.
142
Works Cited
Ambrus, Jnos. Return Home with Hopes. Hungarian Studies on Gyrgy Lukcs. 2 vols. Ed.
Lszl Ills et al. Budapest: Akadmiai, 1993. 2: 41633.
Azadovskii, Konstantin, and Boris Egorov. Kosmopolity (Cosmopolitans). Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 36 (1990): 83135.
Azadovskii, Konstantin, and Boris Egorov. From Anti-Westernism to Anti-Semitism.
Journal of Cold War Studies 4.1 (2002): 6680.
Feuchtwanger, Lion. Moscow 1937. My Visit Described for My Friends. Trans. Irene Josephy from
the German Ein Reisebericht fr meine Freunde (1937). London: Victor Gollancz, 1937.
Gide, Andr. Return from the U.S.S.R. (1936). Trans. Dorothy Bussy. New York: Knopf, 1937.
Hay, Julius. Born in 1900. Memoirs. Trans. J. A. Underwood. London: Hutchinson, 1974.
Herf, Jeffrey. Divided Memory. The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
UP, 1997.
Janka, Walter. Spuren eines Lebens (Traces of a Life). Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1992.
Jarmatz, Klaus, et al. Exil in der UdSSR (Exile in the USSR). Leipzig: Reclam, 1979.
Kadarkay, Arpad. Georg Lukcs: Life, Thought, and Politics. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.
Knipovich, Evgeniia. Novaia kniga G. Lukacha i voprosy istorii realizma (G. Lukcss New
Book and Issues in the History of Realism). Internatsionalnaia literatura 11 (1939): 20510.
Kkai, Kroly. Im Nebel. Der junge Georg Lukcs und Wien (In the Fog. The Young Lukcs and
Vienna). Vienna: Bhlau, 2002.
Kolesnikoff, Nina. Bruno Jasienski: His Evolution from Futurism to Socialist Realism. Waterloo,
Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 1982.
Kurella, Alfred. Ich lebe in Moskau (I live in Moscow). Berlin: Volk und Welt, 1947.
Leonhard, Wolfgang. Der Schock des Hitler Paktes. Munich: Knesebeck und Schuler, 1989.
Loewy, Hanno. Bla Balzs Mrchen, Ritual und Film (Bla Balzs Fairy Tale, Ritual, and
Film). Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2003.
Lukcs, Georg. Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (History and Class Consciousness). Berlin:
Malik, 1923.
Lukcs.Georg. Die Neue Verfassung der UdSSR und das Problem der Persnlichkeit. Aus
einem Vortrag. Internationale Literatur 6.9 (1936): 5053.
Lukcs, Georg. Marxismus und Stalinismus. Reinbeck: Rowohlt, 1970.
Lukcs, Georg. Record of a Life. An Autobiographical Sketch. Ed. Istvn Ersi. Trans. R. Livingstone. London: Merlin, 1983.
Lukcs, Georg. The Young Hegel. Trans. R. Livingstone. London: Merlin, 1975 (First published as Der junge Hegel: ber die Beziehungen von Dialektik und konomie, Zurich and
Vienna: Europa, 1948; second edition: Der junge Hegel und die Probleme der kapitalistischen
Gesellschaft, (East) Berlin: Aufbau, 1954).
Lukcs, Georg. ber Stalin hinaus (Beyond Stalin). 1969. Blick zurck auf Lenin: Lukcs, die
Oktoberrevolution und Perestroika (Looking back at Lenin: Lukcs, the October Revolution,
and Perestroika). Ed. Detlev Claussen. Frankfurt/Main: Luchterhand, 1990. 21522.
Martin, Terry. The Russification of the RSFSR. Cahiers du Monde Russe 39.12 (1998):
99118.
Mller, Mikls. A Martyr of Science. Ervin Bauer (18901938). Hungarian Quarterly 46
(2005): 12331.
Mller, Reinhard, ed. Die Suberung. Moskau 1936. Stenogramm einer geschlossenen Parteiversammlung (The Purge: Moscow 1936. Stenographic Record of a Closed Party Metting). Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1991.
143
Pike, David. German Writers in Soviet Exile, 19331945. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P,
1982.
Ronen, Omri. Iz goroda Enn (From the City of Enn). St. Petersburg: Zvezda, 2005.
Sereda, V., and A. Stykalin, eds. Besedy na Lubianke (Conversations at the Lubianka). 2nd ed.
Moscow: Institut slavianovedeniia RAN, 2001.
Sharapov, Iurii. Litsei v Sokolnikakh (The Lyceum in Sokolniki). Moscow: Airo-XX, 1995.
Siebert, Ilse. Gesprch mit Georg Lukcs (A Conversation with Georg Lukcs). [Conducted in 1967] Sinn und Form 2 (1990): 32131.
Sink, Ervin. Roman eines Romans. Moskauer Tagebuch (Novel of a Novel: A Moscow Diary)
Trans. Edmund Trugly, Jr. Cologne: Wissenschaft und Politik, 1962.
Studer, Brigitte, and Berthold Unfried. Der Stalinistische Parteikader. Identittsstiftende Praktiken
und Diskurse in der Sowjetunion der dreiiger Jahre (The Stalinist Party Cadre: Identity-Bestowing Practices and Discourses in the Soviet Union in the 1930s). Cologne: Bhlau,
2001.
Stykalin, Aleksandr. Derd Lukach: myslitel i politik (Georg Lukcs: A Thinker and Politician). Moscow: Stepanov, 2001.
Szab, Erno. From the Program of Literary Unity to the Defensive: Gyrgy Lukcs and
the Forum. Hungarian Studies on Gyrgy Lukcs. 2 vols. Ed. Lszl Ills et al. Budapest:
Akadmiai Kiad, 1993. 2: 48497.
Szegedy-Maszk, Mihly. The Introduction of Communist Censorship in Hungary:
194549. History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe. Junctures and Disjunctures in
the 19th and 20th Centuries. 4 vols. Ed. Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer. Vol. 3: The
Making and Remaking of Literary Institutions. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2007. 11425.
Sziklai, Lszl. Georg Lukcs und seine Zeit, 19301945 (George Lukcs and His Times). Budapest: Corvina, 1986.
Tihanov, Galin. Revising Hegels Phenomenology on the Left: Lukcs, Kojve, Hyppolite. Comparative Criticism 25 (2004): 6795.
Tihanov, Galin. The Master and the Slave: Lukcs, Bakhtin, and the Ideas of Their Time. Oxford and
New York: Clarendon and Oxford UP, 2000.
Tihanov, Galin. Viktor Shklovskii and Georg Lukcs in the 1930s. The Slavonic and East
European Review 78.1 (2000): 4465.
Tischler, Carola. Flucht in die Verfolgung. Deutsche Emigranten im sowjetischen Exil, 1933 bis 1945
(Flight into Persecution. German migrs in Soviet Exile, 193345). Mnster: Lit, 1996.
Toks, Rudolf L. Bla Kun and the Hungarian Soviet Republic: The Origins and Role of the Communist Party of Hungary in the Revolutions of 19181919. New York: Praeger, 1967.
Unfried, Berthold. Kommunistische Knstler in der Sowjetunion der dreiiger Jahre: Kulturelle Miverstndnisse und Konkurrenz (Communist Artists in the Soviet Union:
Cultural Misunderstandings and Competition). Jahrbuch fr Historische Kommunismusforschung 2000/2001. Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 2001. 12643.
Urbn, Kroly. The Lukcs Debate: Further Contributions to an Understanding of the
Background to the 194950 Debate. Hungarian Studies on Gyrgy Lukcs. 2 vols. Ed.
Lszl Ills et al. Budapest: Akadmiai Kiad, 1993. 2: 43451.
Viliam-Vilmont, N. N. Vozvedenie na prestol Osvalda Spenglera (The Enthroning of
Oswald Spengler). Internatsionalnaia literatura 56 (1940): 288303.
Wat, Alexander. My Century. The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual. Trans. Richard Lourie. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988.
Zsuffa, Joseph. Bla Balzs. The Man and the Artist. Berkeley: U of California P, 1987.
144
Kultura (19462000)
Wodzimierz Bolecki
1. Genesis and Beginnings of Kultura

After World War II, Kultura was the most important Polish migr monthly
publication; for decades; it was the only East-Central European migr publication in the West that mattered. Its activities had a decisive influence on the
rise and development of the Opposition in Poland in the 1970s, as well as on
the emergence of both a publishing movement independent of communist
censorship, and of dissident magazines such as the Russian Kontynent (1974),
the Ukrainian Suczastnist (1961) and Widnowa (Modernity; 1985), the Czech
Svedectv (1956), and the Hungarian Magyar Fzetek that Pter Kende founded
and edited 197889 in Paris (Kowalczyk Giedroyc; K. Pomian W kregu).
The contributors to Kultura were among the most prominent migr writers,
scholars, and journalists, as well as representatives of the intellectual elite from
many European countries with communist regimes. Almost all intellectuals interested in Central and East Europe sympathized with it (G. & K. Pomian 12758).
Today, the term Kultura encompasses three different serials: (1) the monthly
Kultura; (2) the book series Biblioteka Kultury (Library of Culture; 1953), which
featured works of literature, history, and journalism in three series (Documents,
Archive of Revolution, and Without Censorship); and (3) the periodical Zeszyty
Historyczne (Historical Notebooks; 1962), which published articles on twentieth-century history. The publisher of all these was the Instytut Literacki (Kowalik, Danielewicz-Zielinska, Supruniuk vol. 1).
The genesis of Kultura the conception of its mandate and most important
guiding principles was tied closely to Polands history during the last two
hundred years, while the beginnings of Kultura, and even the fate and choices
of its editors, were linked to the end of World War II. The war brought EastCentral Europe under Soviet domination, the Baltic states ceased to exist, almost forty percent of the Polish territory was annexed by the Soviet Union,
along with the major cities of Vilnius (Wilno) and Lviv (Lww), while Poland
gained part of a former German territory, including the major cities of Szczecin and Wrocaw [Breslau].
Kultura (19462000) (Wodzimierz Bolecki)
145
The Beginnings of Kultura (Italy)

The post-1945 Polish political emigration comprised primarily former soldiers who had fought against the Germans on all fronts and found themselves
outside Poland. Where did these soldiers-emigrants come from? After the
partition of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union (in accordance with the
Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of August 23, 1939), tens of thousands of
soldiers were evacuated to the West, and as many soldiers were arrested by the
NKVD in eastern Poland occupied by the Soviet Union on September 17,
1939. Thousands of them were murdered in the Soviet Union, while the remaining ones were sent to camps. The Polish Government in Exile (first in
France, from 1940 in London) organized the underground Armia Krajowa
(Home Army) in 1939 on the Polish terrain occupied by the Soviet Union and
Germany.
Three different Polish regiments were formed from the soldiers in the West
and East: 1) the Western Polish Army under the Polish Government in Exile
with soldiers who got away before Poland was partitioned by Germany and
the Soviet Union in 1939; 2) the Polish Army named after Tadeusz Kosciuszko, formed of Polish citizens in the Soviet Union by Stalin; and 3) the
Polish Army formed of Poles released from Soviet camps and prisons on the
basis of an agreement reached in July 1941 between Stalin and Churchill. The
latter, led by General Wadysaw Anders (who was also released from a
camp), was given permission by Stalin to leave the Soviet Union in 1942. It
joined the Polish forces in Palestine (1943) that had earlier fought in Africa
and elsewhere, and became part of the Eighth British Army known in the East
as the Second Corps (Habielski Zycie).
Among the soldiers in both regiments of the Western Polish Army were
many intellectuals, writers, reporters, scholars, journalists, political activists,
and diplomats mobilized in 1939. During the war, they carried out an intensive round of instructional, educational and cultural activities among the soldiers. Among them were the future founders of Kultura: Jerzy Giedroyc (lawyer, high-ranking member of the government before 1939, editor of two
weeklies, diplomat), Jzef Czapski, a painter and writer, Zofia Hertz and her
husband Zygmunt, both lawyers, as well as Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski, a literary critic. In August 1947, General Anders nominated to the personnel of
the Instytut Literacki Giedroyc, Herling-Grudzinski, Zofia and Zygmunt
Hertz (Giedroyc Autobiografia; Ptasinska-Wjcik; Kowalczyk Giedroyc).
The most important figure was Giedroyc, who was known in a narrow profession circle before the war, but not in the broader public. In 1942, he became the head of the Propaganda Office and of the Second Corps Kultura.
146
Czapski had previously worked in the Propaganda Office, while HerlingGrudzinski had worked for the Armys publishers. The most important publication under the commander of the Second Corps was the weekly Orze Biay
(White Eagle), together with a book series titled Biblioteka Ora Biaego (ChapNowakowa).
When it became clear in 1945 that the agreements at the Allied Conferences of Teheran (1943) and Yalta (1945) would leave Poland to the Soviet
Union, hundreds of thousands of Poles (mostly demobilized soldiers) decided to remain abroad. Poles who had lived in eastern Poland prior to the war
had nowhere to return, for their lands became part of the Soviet Union in
1939. From the perspective of the exiles, the Soviet occupation simply replaced the German one. The Yalta agreement was for the Poles what the
Treaty of Trianon (1920) had been for the Hungarians.
The Polish emigrants in Western Europe were concentrated in two cities:
London and Paris. After 1945, the London-based Polish Government in Exile
continued to exist, with political parties, press, etc. This gave the emigrants a
sense of legality and continuity with the prewar Polish state. The Polish postwar migrs also settled in other countries of Western Europe, in both Americas, and in Australia. It became clear that so many Polish migrs would need
various forms of communication, and their own institutions for organizing
intellectual life in the West.
After his discharge from the army, Jerzy Giedroyc decided, therefore, to
continue his publishing activities, with Polish migrs as his audience. With a
loan from the army, he bought a press (Officine Grafiche Italliane, or Oggi)
and he opened in January 1946 in Rome the Instytut Literacki (registered
under the name of Casa Editrice Lettere). Giedroyc quickly repaid the loan
so that he could freely criticize the exilic Polish politico-military establishment without being accused of ingratitude ( Jelenski Kultura; Giedroyc
ebrowski).
Autobiografia; Kowalczyk; Ptasinska-Wjcik; Z
Genesis: The Historical Tradition of Kultura

In creating the Instytut Literacki, Giedroyc consciously forged a connection
with an identical situation 150 years earlier. After the partition of Poland by
the imperial powers of Russia, Prussia, and Austria (1795), Polish soldier-emigrants in Italy (serving in the so-called Polish Legions of Napoleons army)
created the Instytut Naukowy (Academic Institute) to preserve Polish
national life abroad. It was in 1798 that a Polish national hymn, originally the
song of emigrants, was written. The genesis of Kultura was therefore both his-
147
torical (deeply rooted in the Polish tradition of independence) and symbolic.

It bears keeping in mind that the emigrants who remained in the West after
1945 regarded their fate as a continuation of the annals of the Polish emigration of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The first two books published by Giedroyc were, actually, dedicated to the Legions of the eighteenth
century. As Giedroyc stated in the founding document of Instytut Literacki:
[Its] mandate is to provide migr Poles with a selection of literary masterpieces, to demonstrate thus to them the many centuries of cultural tradition thanks to which we know
that a great nation may fall, but only one dishonored may disappear a nation without a
yesterday or today. [] In the tradition of Polish Culture and the Polish fight for independence, Polish socio-political thought also played a far-reaching role []. The Instytut Literacki considers it therefore special and important for our age to acquaint readers
with its intellectual achievements and its evolution.
The goal of the Instytut Literacki was, according to Giedroyc, to inspire the
emigration to a movement of thought and action in the sphere of culture, to
organize Polish life according to the principles of political equality, social justice, respect for law, and the dignity of the human being. The time is coming
when not only every political and social activist but every contemporary cultured Pole will have to know the books with which the Instytut Literacki is
supplying its readers [] If the Instytut fulfills its task, perhaps we will have
the right to repeat the words uttered 150 years ago [i.e., in 1798], words representing the act of establishing the Legions Academic Institute in Italy: It is
with the skills acquired here, and bearing the true and pure republican heart,
that we shall return to our homeland and become more useful to it, than our
forefathers who pilgrimaged around the world (Kowalczyk Giedroyc).
This formulation, which grew from the Enlightenment idea that social reforms could be achieved through educational, academic, and literary activities, became the actual program of Giedroycs Instytut Literacki.
Kultura in France
At the turn of 1946/1947, Giedroyc decided to transfer the Instytut Literacki
to France, with the permission of General Anders. The reasons were both
economic (the drop in readership among soldiers, the Italian revenue service,
which was strangely suspicious of firms showing a profit, Italian disinterest in
the Instytuts printing services) and, primarily, political: the pro-communist
Italian establishment treated the Polish migrs as lepers, as fascists who
refused to return to a home country liberated by Stalin. In France, which
had hosted many Polish migrs since the eighteenth century, Jzef Czapskis
148
personal acquaintance with General de Gaulle secured the Instytut the French
governments favorable disposition (Giedroyc Rozmowa; Giedroyc Auto ebrowski).
biografia; Kowalczyk Giedroyc; Ptasinska-Wjcik; Z
Giedroyc sold the printing press in 1947 and invested the money in a new
office in Maisons-Laffitte, just outside Paris, to which the operations of the
Instytut were transferred in November. (Due to the high rent, the premises
had to be abandoned in 1954, but thanks to loans and contributions from
readers a new house was purchased next year in the nearby suburb of Le Mesnil-le-Roi. The name of Maisons-Lafitte was retained.) The beginnings in
France were very difficult, Giedroyc recalled: The money we received from
selling the printing house in Italy ran out quickly, though our costs were minimal. [] After that very difficult moments followed. Czapski had to ravel
twice to America to raise funds among Polonia and American friends. It
allowed us to survive the two, three most difficult years before we could stabilize (Giedroyc Rozmowa; see also Jelenski Kultura; Giedroyc, Autobiografia; Kowalczyk Giedroyc). The villa purchased in 1954 houses today the
Archiwum Instytutu Literackiego (Archive of the Literary Institute), one of
the most highly valued Polish archives on the migrs.
2. The Editorial Staff

Jerzy Giedroycs Profile
The main ideas behind Kultura connect directly to the Yalta Conference,
which ceded control over East-Central Europe to the Soviets; but Kulturas
strategic setup can be understood properly only through a consideration of
Giedroycs biography.
The future editor of Kultura was born in 1906 to an old (part Russified, part
Polonized) Lithuanian family in Minsk, where he spent his childhood and
youth. He lived 191617 in Moscow, and moved in 1918 to Warsaw. Giedroyc
had a good understanding of Eastern Europe and he recognized even before
World War II that the regions biggest problems were: (1) national conflicts,
which the Bolsheviks and Nazis exploited to advance their totalitarian aspirations; and (2) ignorance of the regions problems on the part of Western
politicians. In Giedroycs opinion, then, the key was to establish relations
among Poles, Ukrainians, Belarussians, and Lithuanians on new terms, and to
gain independence for Ukraine and Belarus.
These ideas were already presented in a prewar publication edited by Giedroyc, Polityka. Giedroycs hero was the creator of independent Poland in 1918,
149
Marshall Jzef Pisudski, who dreamed of a federation with Lithuania, Belarus,

and the Ukraine, within the framework of a multinational reconstruction of the
First Republic that existed from the fifteenth century until 1795, known as Jagellonian Poland. However, Giedroyc knew that certain countries had powerful
aspirations to statehood after World War II and wanted to be treated as equals.
For this reason, Kultura supported the concept that within the framework of a
future European federation independent Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and Belarusians should live on the eastern lands of prewar Poland; the two cities that
played a major role in Polish history and culture, Wilno and Lww, should become the capitals of the independent states of Lithuania and Ukraine. This farreaching vision made credible Kulturas political program to to build new relations among the elites of the Central European nations (Giedroyc Autobiogra ebrowski).
fia; Jelenski Kultura; Korek; Kowalczyk Giedroyc; Stronska; Z
Giedroyc had much experience editing magazines: in 1929, he founded the
Mysl Mocarstwowa (Thought Among the Great Powers), which he later renamed to Bunt Modych (Revolt of the Youth) and then to Polityka. These magazines attracted young, nonconformist intellectuals with conservative sympathies, who leaned equally to the left and to the right (Zbyszewski; Krl;
Korek).
Giedroyc said of himself that he was by nature a political animal. He was
not, however, a political activist. His title Editor was to underscore the exceptionality and exclusivity of his role. He was a shy man, a loner, who felt uncomfortable in making public speeches and had difficulties communicating
directly with people. Nevertheless, by writing letters every day he succeeded
in persuading approximately 2,500 writers from around the world to collaborate with Kultura and to form, as was sometimes said, an invisible editorial
board. His correspondence numbers at least several tens of thousands of
letters (Kowalczyk Od Bukaresztu), but Giedroyc never wrote a single article.
His few-sentence commentaries, notes, and opinions in Kultura, often signed
Redaktor (Redakcja, Obserwatorium), were limited to the most important
current political affairs.
The Contributors
The people at Kultura were the brothers Jerzy and Henryk Giedroyc (as of
1952), Herling-Grudzinski (19461947; 19561996), Czapski, Zofia and
Zygmunt Hertz. From the beginning, faithful collaborators supported the
editorial board, the most famous of whom were Maria Czapska ( Jzef s
sister), Juliusz Mieroszewski (as of 1950 a permanent member), Konstanty Je-
150
lenski, Jerzy Stempowski, Czesaw Miosz (as of 1951), Witold Gombrowicz,

and later Bohdan Osadczuk, Benedykt Heydenkorn, and Leopold Unger. Although three or four people formed the close-knit Editorial Committee that
lived permanently at Maisons-Laffitte, and several hundred writers contributed in total, the person who actually decided on the contents of each
issue, as well as the on journals profile and strategy, was Jerzy Giedroyc. Kultura had an editorial office but was the publication of one man (Zbyszewski;
ebrowski).
Jelenski Kultura; Kowalczyk Giedroyc; K. Pomian W kregu; Z
Following Mickiewicz, Kultura defined emigration as a pilgrimage to freedom (Herling-Grudzinski Ksiegi). The Kultura team recognized in its
mission no division between personal and professional life. It created perhaps
the last phalanstery in Europe (some compared it to a kibbutz), in which
work and living shared the same space, and the publishing of magazines and
books was the only content of a shared life ( Jelenski Kultura; Kowalczyk
ebrowski). As Miosz wrote:
Giedroyc; K. Pomian W kregu; Z
Those who pick up the annuals of Kultura and the books published by the Instytut Literacki, and those who will pick them up in the future, should reflect for a moment on the
kitchen pots, on the preparing of breakfast, lunch, and dinner by the three, four people
responsible there for the editing, corrections, and distribution, on the washing up, on the
buying (fortunately a simple enough task in France), and multiply the number of these
and similar household duties by the number of days, months, and years. And also [as Miosz remarks] on the strings and packing paper, on lugging, carrying, sending packages
by post.
The costs of living and eating are paid for by shared money, and the editor-in-chief
and his three collaborators receive the same salary, almost the lowest French salary. []
All surpluses are invested in the publication of books ( Jelenski Kultura)
Destitute poverty; the daily threat of bankruptcy; counting every penny; four
people for the entire editing, publishing, and administration of the magazines
and books; and, on top of all this, helping out writers in need, looking for
work for them, welcoming and hosting guests from Poland, thousands of
petty matters and problems. A couple of people with minimal means were capable of accomplishing great work (Zbyszewski).
Giedroyc emphasized that he did not have a personal life. I think that if we
lived in Paris, not to mention London, Kultura would not be able to exist.
What we need is distance and isolation from people. In London and in Paris,
we would not be able to get out of various meetings and visits, which take up a
ridiculously amount of time. But above all: distance (Giedroyc Rozmowa).
As Jelenski wrote: Only the closed circle of emigration allowed Kultura to
survive so long on the same level, to evade being destroyed by weeklies or
supplements in the large dailies, to evade being subsidized by a large publisher
(or even more so by the state) (Kultura).
151
This is why Giedroyc considered that the precondition for Kulturas success
could only be independence from sponsors, politicians, interest groups, lobbies, etc. Giedroyc repeatedly refused all financial help that would threaten
Kulturas autonomy (Giedroyc Autobiografia; Jelenski Kultura; Zbyszewski;
ebrowski).
Ptasinska-Wjcik; Z
3. Kulturas Program
The First Assessment: The 1940s
The Instytut first focused exclusively on the publication of books, which was
Giedroycs primary aim (twenty-six titles appeared in 19461947; thirty-five
by 1953). Knowing a bit about the prewar Russian emigration, I decided in
advance that organization makes in the long run no difference in emigration;
only words matter. One must think about creating some sort of publishing
house. At the beginning I thought that only books would have a strong influence on the education of a readership (Giedroyc 70). However, the closest
collaborators, especially Herling-Grudzinski, quickly convinced Giedroyc
that publishing a journal was a necessity (Giedroyc Autobiografia; Herling and
Bolecki Rozmowy w Dragonei).
Giedroyc and Herling-Grudzinski published in June 1947 the first issue of
Kultura in Rome. The selection of material and the introduction, written by
both editors, presented the main ideas that remained valid for the more than
fifty years of the journals existence. The first issue contained Paul Valrys Z
kryzysu ducha (La crise de lesprit=The Spiritual Crisis) and Benedetto
Croces Zmierzch cywilizacji (The Fall of Civilization), an excerpt from
Arthur Koestler titled Krucjaty bez krzyza (Crusade without Cross), polemical sketches on Marxism and Existentialism, a study of Lytton Stracheys
work, poems by Frederico Garcia Lorca, and excerpts from the memoirs and
works of Poles in the Soviet Union.
The common theme among the most important texts in this issue was the
crisis of European civilization, the extreme manifestations of which were Soviet Communism and German nationalism (and its consequence, Nazism).
Both led European culture to destruction and barbarism. The goal of the editors became to diagnose this situation and to search for ways out of the crisis,
of which Central Europe was the gravest victim. The editors addressed not
only the migr Poles but also to readers in a Poland governed by the communists, in the hope of strengthening in them the faith that the values dear to
them were not crushed by the sledge-hammer of naked power. Kultura saw
152
the need for an activist, even a heroic, stance to oppose the spread of pessimism and nihilism. The journal thus declared that it wants to seek, in the
world of Western civilization, this will to live without which the European
dies, as once the leaders of ancient imperia did. Kulturas intellectual program
became a battle to restore values in public life that were annihilated through
World War II (Kultura 1947 nr. 1). Stempowski characterized the 1940s in his
memoirs as the years of uncertainty and apprehension, such as Europe had
never witnessed since the times of the invasion of the barbarians and the fall
of the Roman Empire (Kowalczyk Giedroyc).
According to the editors declaration: European culture lost its consistency, its ability to resist and radiate. This period of postwar threat will not last
for long. [] Kultura, finding itself at the very heart of Europes aspirations to
cultural rebirth, wants to take advantage of this privilege and renew ties with
the Polish intellectual movement in both Poland and the Diaspora (Kultura
1947 nr. 23).
Kultura directly translated its philosophy into (1) a political program that
aimed at battling Communism, liberating the country from the Soviet Union,
and regaining of Polands full independence; and (2) a social program that
postulated building the foundations of a modern democracy and a modern
society in a future Poland. The journals title thus had a symbolic meaning.
Kultura became the name for all the intellectual activities that would help the
migrs to commence a battle for the democracy and independence of all
East-Central European countries subject to the Soviet Union.
According to Jelenski, nothing at the time could predict the extraordinary
success of Kultura, but even then we knew that the unusual passion [of Giedroyc], devoid of all personal ambition, would have a decisive influence on the
fate of his country, the fate of all Central Europe (and, as I suspected, also on
the fate of the entire world); this emerged as a cause more powerful than any
sort of collective effort (Kultura).
Kulturas Relation to the Emigration

One of Kulturas main goals was to reach readers in emigration and in Poland.
Giedroyc wanted Kultura to mobilize the migrs dispersed in both hemispheres to think about the future of Poland and East-Central Europe. The
editors hypothesized that, after losing the war, the migrs would distance
themselves from Polish affairs, and that their ties with the homeland would
become merely emotional and nostalgic. Giedroyc feared that the matter of
Poland and East-Central Europe would quickly cease to interest not only
153
foreigners but also Poles in the Diaspora. The consequence would be an acceptance of the status quo. Since he did not believe in migr political parties,
Giedroyc carved out for his monthly the role of integrating the migrs and
readers in Poland. The Instytut Literacki became an intellectual weapon to
achieve political aims.
Kulturas activities were based on the conviction that migr political institutions would gradually lose their significance; the fundamental task of intellectuals in the Diaspora should be to enrich the Polish cultural heritage and to
provide readers in Poland, indirectly, with arguments that would mobilize
them to resist Communism. From the beginning, recalled Giedroyc years
later, we established that migr organizations do not exist []The question
of exerting influence by way of the word was for me the most important
(Giedroyc, Rozmowa 70,77).
Kultura achieved this aim by initiating discussions on themes concerning
the Peoples Republic of Poland, and by systematically analyzing the situation
in all of communist-ruled East-Central Europe. For ideological reasons, Giedroyc assumed a grudging attitude with respect to the Polish Diaspora centered in London. The feeling was mutual:
We were not liked much among the migr communities, especially the one based in
London. [] Primarily, of course, for political reasons. There were relics of the government-in-exile there. [] The atrophy of everything; I am not speaking of thought or
political strategy, just even of political tactics. [] A complete lack of imagination, imprisonment in the London ghetto. That is typical. They have their own parliament, their
own cafs and restaurants, their own businesses; they live in a completely closed world.
And thats just fine with them. [] They consider me an imposter, because no one
stands behind me. I was no Minister or Ambassador. I did not belong to any party. I do
not have a venerable past. I was no colonel, I was only a first lieutenant during the war,
and before that I was a rifleman. (Giedroyc, Rozmowa 7273)
Kultura was convinced that the Polish institutions in Diaspora were incapable
of elaborating their own political concepts. From its first issues, Kultura aspired thus to shape the readers political consciousness according to its own
vision of a future modern, democratic, and independent Poland. Each issue
featured texts that served as voices in an unending debate on Polands and
Central Europes most important topics. Kultura became involved in politics,
not by taking action, but by creating ideas, thoughts, and a vision, shaping the
readers political imagination and sensitivity on issues of public life in Poland,
Europe, and the world.
Kultura had a distinct profile among the post-1945 migr journals. The informational and journalistic sections addressed themselves to all readers; the
essays and literature to the intellectual elite. While the other Polish migr
154
magazines had no ambition to shape reality, Giedroyc created a journal with a

clear ideological profile that expressed the editors position in concrete political, social, or cultural matters. While migr journals did present pluralist
viewpoints, Giedroyc sought out people who would provoke. He rejected the
existing hierarchy and he proposed new ideas for Poles in the Diaspora and in
Poland (Lewandowska; Kowalczyk Giedroyc).
Thanks Kulturas global network of collaborators, it could feature local
chronicles of events. It documented, among others, the events in the Russian,
Lithuanian, Estonian, Latvian, Belarus, and Ukrainian Republics of the Soviet
Union. As a result, Kultura could present a diversity of topics and authorial experiences, as well as cultural and historical perspectives not represented in
other migr journals. It was always concerned with the popularity of Communism in the Western intellectual elite.
One of Kulturas distinguising traits was its vitality. It was edited in an unusually dynamic manner, featuring genres such as journalism, reviews, articles, views, polemics, letters to the editor, editors comments, etc. Almost
every issue contained spirited political, social, and literary discussions, as well
as viewpoints related to peoples outlook on life. Kultura did not publish articles exclusively concerned with the past; these were featured in the Zeszyty
Historyczne. The Kultura articles dealt with current or future affairs.
Without the influx of articles from Polish migrs around the world, and
after 1956 with increasing frequency from Poland as well, Kultura would not
have been able to exist as a viable and relevant journal. Even though it had
more than a dozen permanent collaborators, Giedroyc identified Kulturas
line only with Juliusz Mieroszewskis texts (Habielski in Mieroszewskis Fina
klasycznej Europy; Giedroyc Autobiografia; Mieroszewski Fina klasycznej Europy;
Korek; Kowalczyk Giedroyc; K. Pomian W kregu).
Kulturas Relation to the Peoples Republic of Poland

As for imagining Kulturas role, Giedroyc recalled, the model for me was
Herzens Kooko [The Bell]. Starting with the second issue, it was a journal addressed to the homeland. [] Each migr lives off the homelands lifeblood. Herzens Kooko could not have existed if it did not have a mass of correspondents in Russia itself (Rozmowa 76).
Kulturas editorial team believed that knowledge of the country and the
preservation of ties with Poles living at home was decisive. After 1956, Giedroyc also spoke with ex-communists, who interested him not only as political opponents and representatives of the governing group, but also as repre-
155
sentatives of a new mentality in a new state, the Peoples Republic of Poland.

In opposition to the London migr community, he treated communists as a
real social power, and believed that they would remain politically active after
the fall of the Soviet empire.
One must separate the editors steady long-term aim from the changing
conceptions that appeared in the articles. Kulturas aim was to effect change in
the communist camp by intellectual means. This is why Giedroyc reacted to
events in Poland by including articles that dealt with current affairs; his ambition was to shape the opinion of the Polish intelligentsia under communist
rule, which, exposed to primitive Party propaganda, was deprived of information, democratic models, and a freedom to exchange thoughts. Kultura
realized this aim by initiating discussions on topics prohibited in Poland, analyzing the situation within the country and in all of communist-ruled EastCentral Europe. In Kultura, Communism was treated as a global problem that
had to be battled with many allies, a profound knowledge of the enemy, and
diversified methods.
Most of the migrs imagined life in the Peoples Republic of Poland as a
deviation from which Poland would reemerge unchanged as soon as the communist dictatorship and Soviet occupation disappeared. However, Kulturas
corps treated Polands transformation after 1945 as deep, even irreversible.
Mieroszewski compared the communist revolution to a hurricane, after
which the devastated region, even when rebuilt, would never be the same as
before. He added, however, that recognizing this fact in no way changes our
relationship to the hurricane, which we consider a catastrophe. The foundations of a democratic Poland had to be built in the Peoples Republic. This
was Kulturas mission (Giedroyc Autobiografia; Gierdoyc & Mieroszewski Listy
19491956, vol. 2; Habielski Zycie; Giedroyc & Mieroszewski; Korek; K. Po ebrowski).
mian W kregu; Z
4. The So-called Kultura Line

Although Kultura did not have a program in the strict sense, the fundamental
ideas binding the editors and the strategic aims that they tried to reach (often
called the Kultura line) remained constant. The tactics and notions for
achieving these aims could, however, often change:
Our position was subject to continual jolts. [] It was clear that one had to adapt to a
situation with greater or lesser success, if only because it forced people to think about
deciding, though it may not have had any influence on the course of events. This I consider to be probably Kulturas most important role. Whether or not the various concep-
156
tions prove themselves or not has no great meaning. What is important is to cling to reality. (Giedroyc, Rozmowa 73)
The history of Kulturas program can be divided into periods, each differing
according to its political assumptions, assessments, postulates, selection of
contributors, and, above all, tactics.
194755
According to Giedroyc, Kulturas position during the first period was uncompromisingly anti-Russian and anti-communist. It can be subdivided into the
periods 194750 and 195055 (Giedroyc Autobiografia and Rozmowa;
Korek 1162; Zebrowski).
Typical for this period was the journalistic work of Ryszard Wraga, who
warned against the Soviet danger threatening the West. According to Wragas
articles, Russia never participated in the evolution of universal thought. The
Russian version of every Western idea, even the most revolutionary one, became reactionary. In Wragas opinion, Western Europe was in a crisis, incapable of opposing the Soviet ideological expansion. The only alternative became the US, which, however, was, in his opinion, an immature political
power. James Burnhams pro-American option in The Struggle for the World was
excerpted in Kultura and published in 1947 as a book.
While the theme of Western Europes moral crisis and its consequences
was often treated in Kultura (Florczak), it was formulated most strongly by
Andrzej Bobkowski, who left France for Guatemala in protest against Europes decadence, its acceptance of Bolshevism and Nazism. According to
Bobkowski, the West betrayed the moral and ideological values it espoused,
and was driven solely by economic-political interests. Moreover, it did not
even have the courage to acknowledge its crisis. The consequence was an inability to oppose the expanding and strengthening power of totalitarian ideology i.e., Communism in World War II (Bobkowski, Pozegnanie and
List; Giedroyc, Autobiografia 13234; Giedroyc & Bobkowski). Stempowski
reinforced this assessment by claiming that the Allies were guided during the
war by a conviction of Western civilizations superiority, and a contempt and
colonial disdain for the East. For example, the Allies delivered East-Central
European refugees on Austrian, Swedish, and Yugoslavian territories into the
hands of the NKVD, which meant for them certain death or deportation.
Stempowski also blamed the West for ignoring the ongoing Holocaust: the
Allies knew of the extermination of Jews and Gypsies and did nothing to help
157
them (Stempowski, Corona 16; Stempowski Od Berdyczowa). Jzef Mackiewicz presented the same thesis in his journalistic work and in his novel Kontra,
which was published by Kultura in 1955.
Aleksander Janta-Poczynskis reportage of his 1948 stay in Poland sharply
criticized the West and the migrs, and postulated that the changes in Poland
be accepted. Jantas claim that Poland could never count on the West and must
therefore choose a pro-Russian stance evoked a storm of protest by readers
and by the Polish migr government. Giedroyc defended the publication of
the reportage, for it unleashed a discussion that was possible only because of a
Western freedom of speech. Wankowicz responded in 1949 that the Western
crisis would last many years, but should not be treated as a transitional period,
an inter-epoch. He surmised that Communism, which he viewed as primitive and destructive, would never fall on its own because it would disillusion
the Russians. Only the US could bring about the new epoch, since it was the
only state with the spiritual power needed to overcome the crisis (Giedroyc,
Autobiografia 14449).
The texts in Kultura were literary, and gave peoples outlook on life rather
than political evaluation; the journal tried to work out a constructive position
for Europe, above all on its relationship to postwar Germany and the Soviet
Union. One option was to create a European federation. Kultura first thought
that a pan-European federation should be the precondition for a European
balance of power. However, after 1950, when West Germany was becoming
ever more powerful, Kultura changed its concept by calling for a federation of
states in Central Europe that could become a regional defense against German or Russian domination, or against another German-Soviet pact. Kultura
even proposed the creation of international military regiments of volunteers
from Central Europe who would be stationed in the West. In the context of
this federation of Central European states, Kultura proposed that the Poles
should declare as a gesture of unity with the other Eastern European nations
that they surrender the historic Polish cities of Wilno and Lww.
Kultura published various concepts of a new organization for postwar Europe. Alfred Fabre-Luce suggested the creation of a European empire under
the leadership of France, based on the idea of colonialism (Europa). Raymond Aron proposed creating a single European body encompassing both
the Western and Eastern parts; although he criticized Marxism and Communism, he also perceived many errors in the capitalist system. He saw a threat
not only in communist totalitarianism but also in conquering the crisis by
means of a gradual Americanization of the world (Mit). Giedroyc valued
Arons position (Autobiografia 180). Jan Ulatowski presented another decidedly pro-European stance by claiming that the Polish Diaspora cannot
158
count on a federated Central Europe, because it does not lie in the interests of
the West. He proposed working out a third road, which appealed to Giedroyc.
Between 1950 and 1955, Kultura emphasized most strongly the necessity of
forging a European federation and a pro-American option to combat Communisms ideological expansion. At the beginning, its journalists counted on
the complete destruction of Communism and underscored the mutual interests of Central Europe and America, hypothesizing that the US would win in a
war. A fundamental shift occurred after the publication of George F. Kennans article America and the Russian Future, according to which the US
would guarantee even in the case of war to maintain the Soviet position in
Central Europe. Kultura criticized Kennan for regarding the Baltic countries,
Belarus, and the Ukraine as belonging to the Soviet Union, but it declared that
in light of the American position it was unreasonable to count on the destruction of Communism and the Soviet Union. Kulturas pro-American stance
weakened further with the publication of Samuel Sharps Poland, White Eagle
on a Red Field (1953), which argued that the Poles do not and will not have influence over the fate of their own country, and that Americans should agree
that the Soviet Union alone should determine Central Europes fate. The thesis showed that the Central-European Diaspora held unrealistic political
hopes, and it nullified Kulturas program. For this reason, the journal decided
to support the confrontational stance of the new American President, Eisenhower, believing that a war with the Soviet Union was inevitable, and hoping
that the American doctrine of liberation and mass revenge would lead to
a change in the European status quo and the fall of Communism in the region.
The doctrine changed in 1955, when the superpowers entered into a political
dialogue (Korek 7178).
In 1950, Kultura became involved with the Congress for Cultural Freedom,
whose founders were Arthur Koestler, James Burnham, Ernst Reuter, Sidney
Hook, and Melvin Lasky. The aims of the Congress were similar to those of
the Instytut Literacki (Laqueur). It demanded an ideology-free culture, and a
Europe liberated from from Soviet dictatorship. Many intellectuals supported
the Congress. Representing Kultura at the June 1950 meeting in Berlin,
Czapski remarked that many young people were drawn to Communism,
though the communist apparatchiks kill every thought and every experience in the human beings. He blamed the West: Countries which suffered
the greatest losses only replaced the Gestapo with the NKVD and other Secret Police. What could the youth of these nations think about the victorious
allies? Thousands of young people fled the communist bloc. The best aid
would be to open a university for Central European refugees. Do we not
159
understand, asked Czapski, that our indifference toward the inescapable

barbarization of an entire generation of half of Europe is condemning Europe and us to death? (Giedroyc, Autobiografia 156, 17378; Kowalczyk, Giedroyc 12829). Giedroyc subsequently enlisted the support of Burnham, who
found US funds to open in 1951 the Collge de lEurope Libre with a boarding school in Strasbourg. Although the school educated several hundred students of various nationalities, it contributed little to the cultural integration of
Central Europe because it did received insufficient Western support. For
example, fearing Soviet reaction, the Americans,did not allow Ukrainians to
study at the school (Korek 98; Kowalczyk Giedroyc). The heir to the idea of the
Collge de lEurope Libre became after 1989 the Central European University, financed by George Soros.
Thanks to the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Giedroyc forged closer ties
with Mans Sperber, Jeanne Hersch, Raymond Aron, and Arthur Koestler,
hoping to use the Congress to promote migr writers. This was made possible thanks to Konstanty Jelenski, who became with Giedroycs support the
head of the Eastern European section of the Congresss General Secretariat.
As a leader in the Congress, Jelenski was involved in organizing international
seminars; together with Franois Bondy, he edited the monthly Preuves. Justifying Kulturas position during the period 195055, Giedroyc wrote:
American politics is not only American politics; in a certain sense, it is also British, Belgian, Dutch, Danish, and Polish politics. [] This means that even nations of Great
Britains stature are in a certain sense dependent on the United States. In this context,
voicing the independence of Polish politics from America [] is complete and utter
nonsense. We, the Emigration, are tied to America, just as the Western nations are tied to
America, when American policy is proper and expedient, as well as when its policy is
wrong. (Redaktor, Kultura 1955, nr. 12, 8788: 143; Korek 82)
I did not believe in a world war, but I was convinced that if the United States demonstrated decisively its power this could do much to change the arrangement in Eastern
Europe. Today we do not attempt to persuade anyone to go to Vietnam to fight the communists. Does this mean we have changed our conviction? No, we changed only our policy and tactic, because the international situation has undergone a radical transformation. (Mieroszewski, ABC polityki Final 245)
Kultura published in 1951 Jzef Maria Bochenskis article Zarys Manifestu

demokratycznego (An Outline of Democratic Manifest) with the signature
of Kulturas Editorial Board. The manifest of the Professor at Freibourg concerned the structure of future Poland, as well as its situation in Europe. It was
based on the claim that a constant presence of freedom and equality will decide the history of Europe. This democratic tradition, claimed Bochenski, is
foreign to Russian culture, for equality and freedom were transformed in Russia into a caricature of the European ideals. The communist system reverted
160
to mass slavery on a scale heretofore unknown. The acceptance of Bolshevism was a prelude to a Soviet occupation of the entire continent. In order to
cast off Russian Communism, the European nations would have to integrate
politically: none of us is merely a Pole; [we are] also Europeans from the
Polish canton (317). In April 1951, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, West
Germany, and Italy called in Paris for a European Coal and Steel Community,
the precursor to the European Economic Union and todays European
Union. The Manifest demokratyczny was therefore the first at the time
merely symbolic Polish call for a European Union. However, Polish political
migrs in the West were treated either as enemies or with suspicion. In September 1950, the public prosecutors office in Bern, Switzerland declared that
the dissemination of Kultura, or even the possession of a single issue of it by an
migr, would be a prohibited political act. The prohibition was rescinded
after Kulturas interventions.
Kultura attempted also to hammer out the foundations of a historic PolishGerman memorandum of understanding, which would have Germany declare the inviolability of the western Polish borders and its support of a federation in Central Europe. These plans, which were started shortly after the
end of the war, bore witness to the far-reaching vision of Kulturas contributors (Stempowski Dziennik; Mieroszewski List, Niemcy, and O reforme; Mackiewicz; Kowalczyk, Giedroyc 16265; Korek 99115). A PolishGerman memorandum of understanding could have encouraged Polands potential allies in Central Europe to accept the federation. The Hungarian conservative migr politician Tibor Eckhard, for instance, rejected collaboration
with the Polish emigration, saying that Hungary could not support Poland in a
ebrowski).
future Polish-German conflict over borders (Fejto; Korek 103; Z
1956
Giedroyc admitted that Kultura made one of its biggest mistakes ever after
1956 by believing the patriotic declarations of the Secretary of the Polish
Communist Party, Wadysaw Gomuka, and giving him a vote of confidence. As Giedroyc wrote in a letter to Mieroszewski, he thought that with
cunning policy, we can win the battle for the migrs soul and become for the
Homeland, or rather Gomuka, a partner and a rather equal partner at that
(Giedroyc & Mieroszewski 435).
It turned out that this equality with the communists was a fiction, and
Giedroyc quickly had to acknowledge the error. It constituted also a loss of
faith in Mieroszewskis concept of evolutionism, which assumed that the
161
communist system would evolve naturally into a democracy. (Giedroyc, Rozmowa 79). After the bloody suppression of the Hungarian Revolt by the Red
Army, and the events in Poland in the years 195658, Giedroyc became convinced that the so-called liberalization of the communist system was not an
evolution but rather social engineering, that is, controlled change within a
framework that communist powers tightly defined. Kultura withdrew its support for Gomuka at the end of 1957. Polish communists, Giedroyc wrote
in a special letter sent to the readership in Poland, had a literally historic opportunity to show the world that they were able to lead a democratic society.
[] They had the opportunity to discredit the thesis [] that one cannot collaborate with communists; one can only fight them (Korek 167272; Kowalczyk Giedroyc; Zietara). Any step to democracy in Poland, wrote Mieroszewski, will be treated in Moscow as an act against the Soviet Unions safety.
Nevertheless, Polish society has to demand democratic reforms in Poland,
step by step. (Lekcja wegierska).
19651980
In 1965, Jacek Kuron and Karol Modzelewski, young revisionist Marxists,
proclaimed in an Open Letter to the Party that the system was in crisis and
that it was imperative to renew the idea of Socialism, because, in their opinion,
Stalinism had rendered it hypocritical. They claimed that the Party bureaucracy lived off the workers, and they called for a proletarian revolution to
overthrow the parasite. Kultura, which published this text in 1966, considered
Kurons and Modzelewskis analysis more accurate than Milovan -Dilas wellknown The New Class (1955). Although the letter was not radical, it was the
only critical analysis of Communism from the inside. Should Kuron and
Modzelewski, members of the Party, put on trial, Giedroyc offered to send
funds to help pay for their lawyers. Giedroyc acknowledged that the Polish
United Workers Party (PUWP; in Polish PZPR) was successful in linking Stalinist totalitarianism to nationalism, and that potential reformers had lost
most of their influence. For Giedroyc, it was obvious that evolutionism,
which still had its proponents, would not lead to the desired outcomes. Kulturas assessment was pessimistic: Polish society was intimidated and incapable of self-organizing. As Giedroyc wrote to Mieroszewski in 1963, the revolution was in a sense more profitable for the Hungarians than the peaceful
Polish October was for the Poles (Giedroyc & Mieroszewski; Kowalczyk
Giedroyc). In the mid-1960s, Giedroyc finally gave up the concept of evolutionism. Various methods had to be applied, but always in view of the most
162
important goal: the overthrow of Communism in Central Europe and the

building of democracy (Korek).
The student protests of 1968 and the workers protest and revolt in Gdansk
in 1970 rekindled Giedroycs hopes. As a result of the protests and the March
movement of post-revisionists, young intellectuals like Adam Michnik and
Stanisaw Baranczak emerged, who soon became important contributors to
Kultura and leaders of the oppositions intellectual life. These young intellectuals came to an understanding with Giedroyc. They wanted to link the democratic opposition in Poland to the Diaspora (Friszke), for they believed that a
critical dialogue with the Diaspora might awaken the intelligentsia at home.
The partner for the revolutionary intellectuals could only be Kultura. The
group nicknamed mountaineers smuggled Kultura books into Poland across
the Tatra mountains, but they were arrested at the Polish-Czech border and a
number of them were sentenced in an unprecedented trial (Karpinski;
Kuczynski; Korek; Kowalczyk Giedroyc; Ptasinska-Wjcik).
According to Korek, the post-revisionists distanced themselves from the
ideas of independence promoted by Kultura because they had no interest in
the state. Instead of independence, they called for the liberation of society and
the individual. Social justice, for the post-revisionists, was more important
than the state. Giedroyc and the migrs could not, however, imagine democracy without a sovereign state and an independence that would guarantee
democracy. According to the post-revisionists, the most important battle
against totalitarianism was not played out in the political arena, but in the cultural and scholarly arenas that create values and are the fundamental ingredients in social bonds and in a national identity based on universal principles. As
Leszek Koakowski wrote, society must first acquire by dint of hard work a
democratic consciousness and teach tolerance in order to prevent a national
dictatorship after the fall of Soviet totalitarianism (Korek).
Kultura began to publish works by new contributors in the 1970s. One of
the most prominent among them was Koakowski, whom the communist
government expelled from Poland. While working at universities in the West
he began collaborating with Kultura by publishing there his famous essays and
books. His essay, Tezy o nadziei i beznadziejnosci (Theses about Hope and
Hopelessness) was discussed heatedly among the migrs and, unofficially, in
Poland. It constituted a fundamental reversal in the relationship between the
mostly leftist intelligentsia in Poland and the Diaspora, leading to collaboration with Kultura. Giedroyc and the intellectuals in Poland soon found a
common ground in assessing the social situation in Poland. Mieroszewski and
Giedroyc were convinced that the intelligentsia had to cooperate with the
workers if change was to occur in Poland. After the student strikes of 1968
163
and the massacre in Gdansk in 1970 (on which the official opposition did not
take a position), Kultura dedicated much attention to the social atmosphere in
Poland, believing that it would become even more radicalized. In the
mid-1970s, Giedroyc foresaw an explosion of social dissatisfaction. Its progress and fallout, he claimed, would be more significant than in December
1970, because the PUWP had already lost trust. Warning that the consequences of a new workers protest would be catastrophic, Kolakowski agreed
that the intelligentsia must support the workers: we should accept that today
there is no difference between the concerns of the workers and those of the
intelligentsia, just as there is no difference between the matters concerning
the nation and civil liberty. [] Here and now these competing claims are coalescing into one (Kultura 1976 nr. 6; see also Kowalczyk, Giedroyc 227240
and K. Pomian W kregu).
Recently recruited journalists like Zdzisaw Najder (alias Socjusz), Czesaw
Bielecki (alias Maciej Poleski), and Jakub Karpinski (alias Marek Tarniewski)
submitted by the mid-1970s their articles directly from Poland, where the
situation was changing rapidly. Several opposition groups (KOR, ROPCiO,
KPN, PPN) were formed, with their publishing houses and magazines. It was
the heady birth of pluralism in many regions of Poland, as well as the fulfillment of Giedroycs expectations. The polemics about programs and activities
soon started to appear in Kultura.
Socjusz pointed to the relicts of revisionism in the new opposition programs. He polemicized with their theses, cautioning the opposition against establishing ties with any faction of the Party, even with those that were considered liberal and would be prepared to carry out their social objectives. He
applied pressure, by arguing that the cause of Polands catastrophe was the
communist system as such, and no specific group in the Party. The opposition
should demand structural changes (Najder; Kowalczyk Giedroyc; Korek; Ptasinska-Wjcik).
The theses of the so-called polrealists, represented in Kultura by Stefan
Kisielewski (alieas Kisiel) provoked the sharpest polemics. They renounced
Polish independence and claimed that a Poland neighboring on both Germany and Russia must decide that Germany was the foe and Russia a friend
that would guarantee the western Polish border. In Kisiels opinion, neither
evolution nor the fall of Communism would alter the regional balance of
power. He proposed that the opposition should bypass the Polish communists and come to terms with the Soviet Union, and he imagined that the Soviet Union would, in return, become an eternal ally of the Peoples Republic
and agree to democratic elections in Poland. Giedroyc polemicized with the
polrealists, invoking Kulturas political credo that Poland, though it bor-
164
dered on the Soviet Union, was a neighbor of the Ukrainians, Lithuanians,

and Belarussians rather than the Russians. migr journalists like Mackiewicz, and homeland ones like Socjusz also disagreed with the polrealists.
19801989: Solidarity
The 1980 strikes confirmed Giedroycs predictions. They were planned by the
opposition and brought the intelligentsia and workers together. But the opposition was ideologically divided for it included both the liberal-leftist Komitet Samoobrony Spoecznej KOR (Workers Defence Committee, established in 1976) and the right-leaning Ruch Modej Polski (Young Poland
Movement), which fastened onto national traditions. Giedroyc appealed to
the West for support in 1980, adding: We do not expect wonder and applause
from the West; that is not useful to us in the least. Recalling that during
World War II the West spoke of Poland as the inspiration for the world and
yet surrendered it to the Soviet Union, Giedroyc reminded the West that declaring Solidarity as an inspiration for the world would invoke among
migrs nausea and the specter of the Yalta Conference. He expect concrete,
enduring, and sensible solidarity.
As long as Solidarity functioned legally (September 1980 to December
1981), commentaries on the situation in Poland filled Kulturas pages. It demanded reforms in the socialist economy through the privatization of state
industries. When the Soviet Communist Partys politburo warned Poland in
June that the internal situation (namely, the existence of Solidarity)
threatened Polands independence, Giedroyc formulated unequivocal conditions to improve the Polish-Soviet relations: transparency, equality, and truth
about the Katyn crime, the Warsaw uprising, and the fate of Poles in the Soviet Union (Kowalczyk Giedroyc; K. Pomian W kregu).
Giedroyc called the declaration of martial law on December 13, 1981 an
assassination by a licentious Party soldiery, with Moscows agreement and
encouragement. Kultura took a hardline position: by ushering in martial law,
the Polish communists ruled out any national partnership. The blow, which
fell on us December 13, 1981 can be compared only with Hitlers invasion or
with the NKVDs stunts in 19441945 (K. Pomian, 13 grudnia 1981 Kultura 1982 nr. 12, 1216). The martial law was Soviet fascism. Kultura rejected
Jaruzelskis propaganda that the lesser evil of the martial law prevented the
greater evil of a Soviet intervention in Poland. As Kulturas journalists saw it,
Solidaritys unforgivable error in Soviet eyes was its very existence. HerlingGrudzinski, who regarded the theory of the lesser evil as a blackmail, devoted
165
many passages of his Dziennik pisany noca (Diary Written at Night), as well as
one of his best short stories, Dzuma w Neapolu (Plague in Naples), to the
martial law (Herling and Bolecki, Rozmowy 5665).
The introduction of martial law, which signified a dramatic defeat of the
hope that the communist system could evolve, generated in Kultura very
heated discussions about Solidaritys strategy in dealing with the communists.
The migrs and veterans took a radical position. Solidarity, wrote Giedroyc,
was neither organizationally nor psychologically prepared for aggression and
for risking to die. The lack of preparation was due not only to Solidaritys
ethos of peace, but also to the limitated repertoire of political battle methods:
If we want to avoid the massacre of the defenseless, we will have to be ready
to respond to force with force (Kowalczyk Giedroyc).
In the very first months of the martial law, Kultura became the intellectual
center of migr discussions on the Polish oppositions new program of action. From the perspective of migrs, after 1981 it became most important to
save the idea of Solidarity and the moral values that were essential for society
to achieve its political identity (Socjusz). Early 1982, Giedroyc refused to publish a feuilleton by Kisiel on Solidaritys understanding with General Jaruzelski. Kultura could not share the hopes of Solidaritys underground government about a compromise with the communists, because it believed that the
communists were interested only in Solidaritys liquidation.
In the 1980s, Kulturas significance for an independent political and intellectual life in Poland increased dramatically. One reasons for this was the governments decision at the inception of martial law to shut down all magazines
and to remove those people from the editorial staff who were suspected of
having oppositional leanings. In this context, Kultura became for the migrs
the most important, indeed the only, vehicle to discuss Polish affairs, and, for
the first time on such a scale, for contributors in Poland as well. Thanks to the
contacts that Giedroyc had established over the years it could publish dozens
of Solidarity documents, programs of action, commentaries, polemics, and
accounts submitted from Poland. Kulturas publications during martial law
forged, for the first time, a partnership between the migr political communities and the opposition in Poland. It became a forum which allowed Solidarity activists and advisors to discuss issues with each other, and it was the
only independent, severe, and meritorious judge of the publications and activities of the Solidarity leadership. Its familiar critical relation to people and
events, government and opposition in Poland, its insistence on respect for
democratic principles and values, its prominent contributors all of these factors contributed to Kulturas prestige and status during this period. By 1989,
Kulturas publications were still illegal, but they circulated freely in Poland.
166
Kulturas Main Ideas

We can summarize Kulturas basic credo in terms of the following six points:
1. In fighting Communism, Poland and the nations of East-Central Europe
must collaborate with each other and rely, above all, on one another. This collaboration entails activating the elite and undertaking efforts to reform the future independent states throughout the entire region.
2. Historical divisiveness and national stereotypes, which make understanding among the nations of East-Central Europe impossible, must be
overcome.
3. It is necessary to work towards an understanding among all nations of
East-Central Europe. The most important result of these ideas was the formulation of the concept of ULB (UkraineLithuaniaBelarus) by Kulturas
most important journalist, Mieroszewski. It proposed linking the idea of
Polish independence to the regaining of independence by other East-Central
European countries and the gaining of independence by those that had never
had it (Ukraine, Belarus) (Mieroszewski Rosyjski kompleks polski).
4. A new stage must be reached in cooperation with the Germans, whom
communist propaganda represented as a permanent threat to Poland.
5. There must be respect for pluralism in the world and ideologies (with the
exception of the totalitarian ideologies of Bolshevism and Nazism).
6. Kultura played a major role in the documentation and analysis of historical and artistic Polish-Jewish relations. Articles, memoires, and books on the
shared history of Poles and Jews, as well as translations of Jewish authors, appeared in the monthly itself, and in the books of Biblioteka Kultura and Zeszyty
Historyczne. Giedroyc published articles about Polish-Jewish relations already
in his magazines of the 1930s, noting the rise of anti-Semitic sentiments in Poland. After World War II, due to the genealogy of Kulturas editorial team,
many of the memoirs dealt with Polish officers of Jewish origin who, like
Menachem Begin, played a major role after the demobilization of the Polish
army in 1945 in the creation of the Israeli state and army. Another constant
theme was the extermination of Jews by Germans on Polish soil (the German
concentration camps in Poland in service of the Final Solution). Moreover,
Kultura continually concerned itself with the existence of anti-Semitism
among Poles, and devoted much attention to anti-Semitism in the Polish
Communist Party in 1968 and the ease with which anti-Semitic communist
propaganda was accepted by Polish society. Kultura led the battle against antiSemitism, emphasizing that it was a universal evil, that harms Poland because
it shuts down contact with the West. Realizing its mission to reach a rapprochement between all nations forging the history of Poland, Kultura pub-
167
lished translations of Jewish poetry, for example the anthology Izrael w poezji
polskiej (Israel in Polish Poetry) edited by Jan Winczakiewicz, and writings on
Jewish writers and the history of Jews in Poland, for instance Aleksander
Hertzs book Zydzi w kulturze polskiej ( Jews in Polish Culture), as well as the
first documentary novel about Warsaw getto (Rymkiewicz, Umschlagplatz). It
analyzed the political and social situation in Israel, noting the most important
Polish-Jewish conferences and meetings. In an attempt to foster cooperation
between Poles and Jews as quickly as possible, Giedroyc became in the final
years of his life a patron in the establishment of a Polish Chair at the Hebrew
University in Jerusalem.
Thanks to these ideas and the articles representing all democratic currents,
Kultura became, as Mieroszewski wrote, a parliament of Polish thought in
Diaspora. Josef Mackiewicz sums up the situation well in Niemiecki kompleks: the pluralism of views in a mature society is like an open fan: the
more often the fan flings open more than 180 degrees, the better it demostrates the maturity, dynamism and thus richness of societys thoughts. However, a fan twisted into a tight fist gives the impression of a being short cudgel. It is difficult to characterize univocally Kulturas political voice, as it
published both left- and right-leaning authors, socialists and ex-communists,
Catholics and atheists, conservative nationalists and progressive liberals. All
authors linked anti-Communism with the hope of restoring an independent
and democratic Polish state. Over a few decades, as the political situation in
Poland and the generations of authors changed, the articles evolved from centrist (in the monthlys first phase) to social democratic (in the final phase);
however, the journal had a liberal character throughout its existence. A constant ingredient in Giedroycs strategy was to preserve a distance to all parties,
groups, and political communities, an unwillingness to accept that any topic
was a taboo, the constant poking of a stick in an anthill, the avoidance of
relying on any authority, the decision to regard no institution or people as untouchable (Korek 32734; K. Pomian W kregu).
One instance of this uncompromising critique concerned judging the
Catholic Church. Kultura systematically published articles on Church and religion, which dealt with the place of the Church in a democratic society, with
religion in relation to changing norms and phenomena of civilization, and
with the specific role of the Church in the communist system. The authors
were most often Mieroszewski, Mackiewicz, Antoni Pospieszalski, Dominik
Morawski, and Herling-Grudzinski.
The context for these publications was the Second Vatican Council, various attempts in the West to link Catholicism to Marxism, and the progressive
movement liberation theology. In turn, the situation of the Church in the
168
Peoples Republic of Poland was tied to the paradox of the Peoples Church,
considered in a shallow and conservative religious sense, but having fundamental influence on the preservation of national identity and the building of
resistance against Communism. During the martial law, the Catholic Church
was the only place where the opposition could meet legally, and organize material and financial aid for those repressed. The majority of the Kultura articles
on the Church appeared in the column On Religion without Unction,
which broached taboo topics and posed fundamental questions about the future of the Church as an institution, its relationship to Communism, the
politics of the Vatican, its relation to other faiths, and the place of Christianity
at the end of the twentieth century (G. Pomian vol. 2).
5. Kultura: Writers and Literature

Though Giedroyc considered the European democratic tradition, its political
ideals, and its cultural achievements as the most important weapon against
Communism, he realized that to achieve his goals he needed writers, even if
Kultura was not a literary magazine. Kulturas Editorial Board thought that the
collective life of the post-1945 Polish Diaspora (deprived of a nation like the
Jews) would gravitate towards writing, for literature was from the eighteenth
century on the fundamental form of collective life of migr Poles. Stempowski, who wrote in 1955 that literature is the only form of expression in
emigration that did not submit when facing power, was of similar mind. As
long as migr literature exists, it will appear that some sort of national
power stands behind the migr political institutions. If migr literature disappears, emigration will be a fait accompli and the Kremlin will wash its
hands (Kowalczyk Giedroyc).
Kulturas service to Polish literature has been unimaginably great. In its first
decade, Giedroyc drew the most prominent migr writers to the fold and he
created in this manner a diverse, invisible literary community of migrs.
Thanks to Giedroyc, writers thousands of kilometers afar, who would have
surely remained unknown in their countries of settlement, came to be published in Kultura. Giedroyc reached them by mail, persuaded them (sometimes
it took several years!) to write for Kultura, proposed themes, inspired the publication of books, scrambled to get translations, honoraria, and prizes (he lobbied that Gombrowicz and Miosz get a Nobel prize). Czapski, Stempowski,
and some other older writers began to write again after the war only thanks to
Kultura. The journal undoubtedly salvaged for Polish literature many exceptional writers, including Gombrowicz, Miosz, Straszewicz, Bobkowski, and,
169
after 1956 in a certain sense, Herling-Grudzinski. Thanks to their publications in Kultura they became known among the migrs, then in Poland, and
even in the world.
Giedroyc contrasted literature to political parties and similar institutions,
which do not create moral models and do not inspire people to intellectual
work, even if they are essential for organizing public life. Literatures prominent place in Kultura expressed Giedroycs conviction that works of literature,
and the ideas contained in them, shape peoples attitudes and are able to
mobilize them to act on behalf of the community. This was Kulturas credo.
Giedroyc, like Herling-Grudzinski, repeated many times that he was raised on
the work of writers interested in social and national affairs, among them Russian writers (e.g. Dostoyevsky, Wasilij Rozanov, Leonid Andreyev), English
eromski,
ones ( Joseph Conrad, Gilbert Chesterton) and Polish ones (Stefan Z
Wacaw Berent and Andrzej Strug). He believed in literatures special mission
in societies deprived of sovereignty (the most important Polish Romantic
writers wrote in exile); he believed in the capacity of literature to shape social
changes, shatter stereotypes, etc. (Giedroyc, Autobiografia 1521, 163171;
Skalmowski; Gorczynska Giedroyc literacki). Herling-Grudzinskis 1945
remark about the writer Stanisaw Brzozowski fits also Kultura: thought and
word are also deed, when they represent not escape, rest, consolation, and solace for dejected and battered souls, but rather a courageous and manly stare
straight in the eye of every reality, even the most threatening one (Nota o
Brzozowskim). Though he considered himself a political animal, Giedroyc never treated literature as a tool. He loved literature, he had an astute
sensitivity to the psychology of writers (he understood that the most eminent
of them did not want to mix creativity and politics), and above all, he had the
talent of a diplomat, which enabled him to keep in close contact with many
contributors (Giedroyc Autobiografia; Kowalczyk Giedroyc; Ptasinska-Wjcik).
Although Kultura published and launched many of the most important
migr Polish writers, Kultura literature or Kultura writers never existed.
Writers retained their distinctiveness and independence. They profited from
the publishing and other benefits that Kultura offered (many of them lived for
a certain period at Maisons-Laffitte), they were in awe of Giedroycs editorial
and publishing accomplishments, but they never created a distinct group
around the journal. Even though the views and concepts behind Kultura congealed in certain matters, relationships would as often as not deteriorate and
lead to confrontations, and, in drastic cases, even to ruptures after many years
of collaboration.
In the second half of the 1970s, when an opposition emerged in Poland,
political topics came to dominate Kulturas pages, while literature and literary
170
criticism receded into the background. Jelenski could not come to terms with
the politicization of the journal, for he regarded it above all a patron of cultural life. Hence he stopped writing for Kultura, and forged in the 1980s close
ties with another migr journal, a new intellectual almanac entitled Zeszyty
Literackie (Literary Notebooks). Mioszs connections with Kultura weakened
for similar reasons when Zeszyty Literackie was launched. Herling-Grudzinski
left Kultura in 1996, though he had been publishing his diaries in the journal
since 1971. Giedroyc demanded that he remove a passage in the new installment of his Dziennik pisany noca that was sharply critical of politicians Giedroyc supported, and Herling-Grudzinski viewed this as an attempt at censorship. He broke off all contacts with Giedroyc, and started to publish all his
texts in Poland, in Plus-Minus, the literary supplement of Rzeczpospolita (The
Republic).
Giedroyc published writers of all ages. The writers from the generation
born at the end of the nineteenth century were represented by Stempowski,
Czapski, Stanisaw Vincenz, Wankowicz, and Stanisaw Mackiewicz; the generation born at the beginning of the twentieth century by Gombrowicz, Czesaw Straszewicz, Jzef Mackiewicz, Miosz, Zygmunt Haupt, and Kazimierz
Wierzynski; those born around 1920 by Herling-Grudzinski, Jelenski, Bobkowski, Marian Pankowski, Andrzej Chciuk, Leo Lipski, and Wacaw Iwaniuk. In addition, Giedroyc helped launch the career of writers who grew up
abroad and began to write in Polish during exile, such as Andrzej Busza, Bogdan Czaykowski, and Adam Czerniawski. After 1956, he published more frequently works by writers living in Poland, such as Marek Hasko, Piotr Guzy,
Sawomir Mrozek, Janusz Szpotanski, Leszek Koakowski, Bogdan Madej,
Jacek Bieriezin, Stanisaw Baranczak, Kazimierz Brandys, Kazimierz Oros,
and Adam Zagajewski.
The writers who published in Kultura were linked by the historical experience of East-Central Europe (next to the ones mentioned above e.g. Henryk
Grynberg and Leopold Tyrmand). The literature published by the Instytut
Literacki was part (certainly the most important part) of migr literature, and
Kulturas contributors also published in other publishing houses. The works
published by Kultura were part of migr literature, which differed from the
literature published in Poland, as we shall now show.
First, migr literature was not burdened with Socialist Realism, which
was a significant problem for the literature in Poland, both as a biographicoliterary experience and as a reaction to the Stalinism of the 1950s, between
1956 and 1990. migr writers did not encounter this problem. A second
characteristic of migr literature was remembering the fate of Polish citizens
on the eastern lands of the Second Republic during World War II. The taboos
171
in Poland encompassed such topics as the Soviet occupation of Poland in

1939, the Soviet concentration camps, and the fate of Poles in the Soviet
Union, especially the murders in the Katyn forest. For migr writers, these
were matters of historical truth and literary language.
With a few exceptions, such as the work of Gombrowicz and Pankowski,
migr literature preserved remembered language; Miosz, Jzef Mackiewicz,
Haupt, Stempowski, Vincenz and others salvaged memories of the Republic
of many nations, cultures, languages, and religions. Starting with the
mid-1950s, the language of literature published in the Peoples Republic of
Poland presented the so-called living post-Yalta speech, including the discourse of marginal groups, colloquial speech deviations from official or literary language, propaganda, or news-speak.
Polish migr literature after 1945 was a continuation of prewar literature.
It was created mostly by writers who started in the 1930s and for whom writing in exile became an extension of their earlier work. Works of Miosz, Gombrowicz, Herling, Mackiewicz, and many others illustrate this continuity
beautifully.
It was only after 1956 that migr literature gradually came to be published in
the Poland, in large measure thanks to the activities of Kultura. Between 1956
and 1976, the state publishing houses published, however, only few works by
migr writers. A radical change took place after 1976, when an illegal publishing market, outside the reach of the censor, emerged: the communists lost
their monopoly over books. After 1976, migr literature mostly books published by Kultura, such as works by Miosz, Gombrowicz, Herling-Grudzinski,
Jzef Mackiewicz, Wierzynski, Stempowski, and Wat reached readers at
home and exerted a crucial influence on literature and criticism in Poland.
From the start, literature was constantly present in Kultura and was represented by all genres and translations. Giedroyc published poems in every
issue; however, the most important and recognizable genres were those of
narrative prose: journalism, reportage, the narrative essay, short story, and the
diary. Kultura also published sociological and philosophical texts, articles on
the history of science on political theory, and other subjects.
The essay and diary soon became Kulturas corporate symbols. They
made important achievements of todays Polish literature possible in the discursive prose of diaries, essays, and that peculiar hybrid of autobiographical
memoir and short story, cultivated, for example, by Gombrowicz, HerlingGrudzinski, Stempowski, Vincenz, Miosz, Jelenski, Haupt, Jzef Mackiewicz, Bobkowski, Tyrmand, and Koakowski.
In the 1980s, twentieth-century migr literature became not only an active
ingredient in a Polish literature that no longer distinguished between the
172
Peoples Republic of Poland and migr literature, it also became a way for an
unexpected continuation. One can say that in the 1980s young writers took on
issues which seemed, for those abroad, to have been exhausted a long time
ago: the condition of migr, the relationship between migr and the homeland, or the intellectual responsibilities of an migr writer. These themes,
which the older migr writers (such as Gombrowicz, Miosz, Herling-Grudzinski, Wittlin, Jzef Mackiewicz, Stempowski, and Jelenski) tackled, revived
unexpectedly in the 1980s in the essays and poetry of writers born in Poland,
like Marek Nowakowski, Stanisaw Baranczak, Adam Zagajewski, Wojciech
Karpinski, Manuela Gretkowska, Bronisaw Wildstein, and Janusz Rudnicki.
Giedroyc never formulated a literary program of his own. Inviting writers
to collaborate, he only asked that their work represent the highest literary
standards, a variety of themes and political views, and that they distinguish
themselves in their originality, even at the price of arousing the aesthetic or
ideological indignation of the readership. Giedroyc preferred literature that
had a clear social calling, touched on myths of collective consciousness, and
provoked discussion. If he disagreed with the author, he would still publish
the work of eminent writers, as was the case of Jzef Mackiewicz and Gombrowicz. He encouraged writers to break conventions, shatter stereotypes,
shape new view points, and demystify. He published writers for whom political freedom expressed itself in free speech. In an important column of Kultura, the Wolna trybuna (Free Tribune), Giedroyc featured comments on
the exclusive responsibility of its writers.
Kultura happily published young writers who were rebellious, considered
controversial, but intellectually original, such as Marek Hasko and Sawomir
Mrozek. As early as 1949, Giedroyc wrote about Kulturas ceaseless effort to
publish not writers who belong to the official literary establishment, but
young writers who, independent of their age, tried to make their own way,
without opportunism, with a hostile attitude to all stereotypes. Kultura published works that were politically indifferent, but disliked those that were
politically submissive (Ptasinska-Wjcik).
In attracting the most eminent writers to Kultura, Giedroyc linked the problematics of literature with the issues of public life, such as it appeared in the
books of Kazimierz Oros, Marek Nowakowski, Wodzimierz Odojewski,
and Bogdan Madej. Articles about the most important writers and works of
twentieth-century literature, discussions about the role of the writer in society, about the writers place within the community, about the relationship
between art and reality, about the moral choices of writers and their consequences for literature were constantly present in the monthly, often in the
form of essays by Miosz, Jzef Mackiewicz, Sawomir Mrozek, Wojciech
173
Skalmowski, and Renata Gorczynska. These themes also appeared in the

diaries that Gombrowicz, Stempowski, and Herling-Grudzinski published
monthly in Kultura. Characteristically, one of the first discussions in Kultura
dealt with Mioszs 1951 decision to stay abroad, and the assessment he gave
in Nie (No) of the of intellectuals place in the communist system. All of
Mioszs books, especially Captive Mind, Gombrowiczs Trans-Atlantyk and
Diary, and Herlings Upiory rewolucji (Phantoms of Revolution), A World Apart,
and Dziennik pisany noca introduced an intellectual dimension into migr literature that was previously unknown, one that transgressed far beyond the
current social and literary affairs. Another important discussion in Kultura
dealt with the relationship of the migr writer to Communism in Poland.
migr writers living in London considered it the duty of migrs to boycott
all institutions in Poland, including the publishing houses. For its part, Kultura
held on to its idea of transforming the attitude of the intelligentsia in Poland,
and stated that the migr writer must seek readers also in countries governed
by communists. This discussion, which took place up until the mid-1970s, was
actually without foundation because the communist censors, with negligible
exceptions, forbade the publication of migr books (Kowalczyk Giedroyc;
Ptasinska-Wjcik).
Giedroycs close ties with the Congress for Cultural Freedom were influential in raising the profile of the books published by the Instytut Literacki.
Thanks to Jelenski, the periodicals subsidized by the Congress, which played
such an important role in Europe, became interested in the work of Miosz
and Gombrowicz, as well as in several writers living in Poland. The critic
Franois Bondy, who was affiliated with Kultura and was especially interested
in the literature of East-Central Europe, served as facilitator. At the same
time, the Biblioteka Kultury published with the Congress financial assistance
Polish translations of books by Simone Weil, Raymond Aron, and others.
When it came to be known in 1967 that the Congress was partly financed by
the CIA, Giedroyc refused accepting all support coming form it.
1969 was an important date in Kulturas history. That year two prominent
writers affiliated with Kultura, Gombrowicz and Stempowski, had died. In
place of their diaries, Herling-Grudzinskis Dziennik pisany noca began to appear. Mieroszewski died in 1976 (Habielski in Mieroszewski Final klasycznej
Europy; Kowalczyk Giedroyc; Wandycz; K. Pomian W kregu). At the same
time, new collaborators joined: Koakowski, K. Pomian, Wojciech Skalmowski (pseud. Maciej Bronski), Micha Heller (pseud. Adam Kruczek), Leopold Unger (pseud. Brukselczyk), Andrzej Chilecki.
Kultura did not separate political from literary discourse. Political issues
were presented through journalism as well as in the essays and literary nar-
174
rative forms. It was similar with moral, philosophical, and cultural issues, for
example, in the work of Herling-Grudzinski, Miosz, Koakowski, and Stempowski.
Faithful to Giedroycs conception, Kultura maintained close contact with
writers and readers in Poland. In Kulturas assessment, most writers after 1945
collaborated with the Communist Party and were corrupted by it. However,
Kultura did not renounce contact with the writers who supported the Stalinist
regime between 1945 and 1955, if they were willing to change their stance. For
Kultura, the turning point in assessing the political views of the intellectuals
was 1956. It welcomed all intellectuals who opposed the PUWP after 1956.
However, the Editorial Board (Giedroyc, Herling-Grudzinski, Mieroszewski,
and Hertz) had no illusions about the attitudes of most intellectuals in Poland:
they considered them to be conformists incapable of making any gestures of
opposition against the communist regime; many of them even supported the
communists hostile attitude towards the migrs. Giedroyc agreed with
Stempowski that older writers took advantage of privileges that other professional groups did not have, while at the same time viewing themselves as martyrs. Up until the mid-1970s, the hypocrisy and cowardice of the intellectuals
in the Peoples Republic of Poland were unmasked mostly in the pages of Kultura. Herling-Grudzinski devoted much space to this topic in his essays in
Dziennik pisany noca. It is necessary to exert some sort of moral pressure on
the literati in the homeland, Giedroyc wrote to Stempowski in July 1956, to
prevent them from debasing themselves anew. [] We cannot allow literature
to break the tradition of Strug and Zeromski. But Giedroyc criticized not
only writers in the Peoples Republic of Poland: he also polemicized with
migr writers in London, whom he considered as talentless imitators of the
romantics.
Giedroyc conjectured that the articles published in Kultura would stimulate opposition against the communist regime in Poland and encourage
writers to abandon their opportunism in relation to the PUWP. In the Polish
eromski and Struga, writing was not a
literary tradition, represented by Z
craft but rather an ethos, a social and national mission on the basis of which
writers would build their moral authority. For this reason, Kultura, most often
in Herling-Grudzinskis writing and Giedroycs correspondence, would
speak of a rejection of this tradition by writers living in the communist system, inferring that they were subservient and cowardly. In Kulturas opinion,
it was incumbent on writers to make of themselves examples for readers and
other citizens. In 1957, Kultura issued an appeal to intellectuals living in Poland: We appeal to writers, journalists, and scholars build up the pressure
of public opinion, carry motions at meetings, write articles in the press de-
175
manding that the embargo on the literary and scholarly work of Poles abroad
be lifted. Even if your protest does not bring concrete results, it will be a witness of the resistance of Polish culture against stupefaction (Mieroszewski,
Dwa fortepiany). Biblioteka Kultury was launched with Gombrowiczs
Trans-Atlantyk, Slub (Marriage; 1953), Mioszs Captive Mind (1953), Zdobycie
wadzy (Seizure of Power), Dolina Issy (Issa Valley;1955), Pankowskis Smaga
pogoda (Stormy Weather; 1955), and Parnickis Koniec Zgody Narodw (End of
the Understanding of Nations; 1955). The publications that followed, Leo
Lipskis stories in Dzien i noc (Day and Night), Mioszs Traktat poetycki (A
Treatise on Poetry), Jzef Mackiewiczs novel Kontra, Gombrowiczs Dziennik 19531956 (Diary 19531956), Andrzej Bobkowskis Szkice pirkiem.
Francja 19401944 (Pen Sketches: France 19401947, all in 1957 were all
difficult works. They shattered the national mythology and demanded a revision of Polish mentality. All of them ignited heated discussions among the
migrs. Today, each of these books belongs to the canon of twentieth-century Polish literature. Very early, in the mid-1950s, Giedroyc began to publish
books written in the Peoples Republic of Poland. In 1958, those books included Marek Haskos Cmentarze (Cemetery) and Stanisaw Rembeks novel
W polu (In Action).
The profile of Biblioteka Kultury crystallized in the early years of the series.
Giedroyc published authors of all generations, all writers with radical political
and aesthetic views, practicians of various genres, and, above all, those that
broached national taboos and stereotypes, posed existential questions, and
searched for a new model of Polishness in contemporary civilization.
After 1956, Giedroyc became the only independent authority for many
writers in Poland, and Kultura the most important Polish publishing house.
Symbolic were the visits by the eminent writers Andrzej Stawar and Aleksander Wat, who were affiliated with the communist movement before the war.
Stawar, employing Marxism as a critical methodology already in the 1930s,
published his anti-Stalinist journalistic work Pisma ostatnie (Final Letters) in
the Biblioteka Kultura, and shortly died afterwards. Wat, who was a communist
sympathizer before the war and was deported during the war by the NKVD,
became the author of one of the most important Polish migr books, an
autobiography that unmasked the mechanism of the Soviet system entitled
Mj wiek (My Age). This autobiography was one of the few eminent books
that Giedroyc decided not to publish. It was soon translated, however, into
French, German, and English.
Up until 1956, contact between Kultura and the writers in Poland was infrequent because few people were allowed to travel outside the country. Kultura was under observation by the communist secret police, and every contact
176
was followed by repression. After 1956, visits by writers from Poland to the
headquarters of Kultura became more frequent, and in the 1970s Kultura became a Mecca for Polish intellectuals (Ptasinska-Wjcik).
Once Kulturas support of Gomuka in 1956 led to disillusionment, it
ceased to rely on the legal dissemination of migr works in Poland. As Giedroyc wrote:
Perhaps I am wrong, but it seems to me that Kultura paradoxically has become a source
of discomfort [in the Peoples Republic of Poland]. [] At any rate, I have observed a
sharpening [of communist politics in Poland]. Kultura is undoubtedly under the fire from
the censor. Its issues are regularly confiscated. [ As] you know, I was from the beginning quite skeptical about the right of circulation in the homeland. My minimal expectations were only that Kultura reach without difficulty magazines, libraries, universities,
as well as journalists and literati. (letter to Jerzy Zawieyski of November 17, 1956, qtd in
Ptasinska-Wjcik 136)
Giedroyc knew that the communist censor would not allow the import of any
work that the PUWP considered as anti-communist. Kultura, therefore, began
to employ sophisticated means of smuggling its books into Poland, for
example, by replacing the covers with those of typical books of Soviet propaganda or by producing them in miniature format with very small type (comparable to the size of a cigarette package). One must remember that in the years
when Kultura began its long march towards achieving a liberalization of
Polish censorship, there were was yet no television, internet, photocopiers,
video cassettes, tape recorders, or any other means of facilitating the dissemination of information and publications. Even the sale of typewriters was controlled. For this reason, the greatest threats to the governments in communist
countries were literature and the public pronouncements of writers. Communists had a monopoly over their content and completely controlled the activities of the magazine editors and publishers. Kultura took up the fight to shatter
this monopoly. Knowing, however, how brutal the system of communist repression was toward people demanding free speech, Kultura did not demand
radical activities of writers. It did support all sorts of testimonies of resistance,
aware that in a communist country every gesture of protest had a political, symbolic, and moral meaning, and, more than that, it became a model for others to
imitate. Giedroyc thought that the only way to force the communists to liberalize censorship was to encourage writers in the Peoples Republic of Poland
to publicly protest against the restriction of free speech. Each such protest laid
bare the falseness of the official ideology, and revealed the lies, and, above all,
the repressive character of the communist power in Poland.
In the 1950s and 1960s, writers who left Poland for a few weeks or permanently (Miosz, Stawar, Hasko, Wat, Koakowski, Mrozek, Herbert), began to
177
collaborate with Kultura. They risked having their works placed on the index
of prohibited authors in Poland, which meant prohibition of publication and
reviewing their books in the Polish press; once they returned, their passport
could be withdrawn, they could be prohibited from leaving the country, and
sometimes even dismissed from their job.
In the 1970s, especially after the establishment of the so-called underground press, writers living in Poland would send Giedroyc their book
manuscripts. Most of them, for example Kazimierz Oros and Marek Nowakowski, published under pseudonyms; the best-known pseudonyms were
Tomasz Stalinski (Stefan Kisielewski), Gaston de Cerizay (Stanisaw Mackiewicz), Pelikan (Zbigniew Florczak), Socjusz (Zdzisaw Najder), Marek Tarniewski ( Jakub Karpinski), Maciej Poleski (Czesaw Bielecki), and Smecz
(Tomasz Jastrun).
6. Kulturas Achievements
The communists ruthlessly fought Kulturas work by means of political propaganda, the secret police, and disinformation, both in Poland and in the West.
Nota bene, the titles of two of the most important communist weeklies in Poland, Polityka and Kultura, were borrowed from the two magazines created by
Giedroyc ( Jelenski Kultura). The communists most violently attacked Kultura throughout the 1950s and 60s. The exception was 195657, when Kultura
could disseminate its publications in Poland, even though it had no right of
circulation. Library regulations were liberalized, and the postal service once
again began to deliver Kultura and books about which the majority of readers
had never heard earlier. Information about Kultura cropped up in the newspapers, and for a few months one could even import Kultura into Poland as
customs were practically inexistent. As a result, Kultura penetrated into the
consciousness of the Polish intelligentsia. However, shortly afterwards, when
this liberalism ended, the communist papers began to criticize Kultura fiercely,
criticizing it emphatically (no other manner of writing was permitted). As a result, Kultura, as an institution representing Polish exiles, migrs, and enemies
of the communist system, was treated by western public opinion (which was
dominated by the left) with skepticism or indifference. In Poland, it was represented as an institution financed by the CIA to carry out espionage, while its
editors and collaborators were depicted as corrupt, frustrated, and working
on the basest of motives (Ptasinska-Wjcik).
However, in the 1970s, a side-effect of these ritualized ideological attacks
became obvious. Many people thought that since the communist were attack-
178
ing Kultura, it must be a good and important journal. A few, specialist libraries
had a collection of the Instytut Literackis publications; however, special permission was needed to access them. Nonetheless, Kultura forged its own legend in the 1970s, based on its accomplishments, and such repressions in the
Peoples Republic of Poland as the trials of Hanna Rewska and the mountaineers, as well as the attempt to put Stanisaw Mackiewicz on trial.
Contrary to the communists intentions, these measures served to integrate
the left-leaning intelligentsia in Poland into Kulturas circle and to forge a positive relationship with the migrs.
The growth of interest in the publications of Kultura and in migr literature in general was linked in the 1970s above all to generational changes and
more frequent travels to the West. In 1976, an independent publishing market
came about in Poland, primarily reprinting migr publications. When Solidarity functioned legally (1981), access to Kulturas publications and other
migr books was practically unrestricted, although formally still illegal, as in
the years 195657. During the martial law, Kultura was accessible only through
the distribution system of the underground publishing houses, at the risk of
severe repression. (G. Pomian Lata Solidarnosci). Of particular importance
was Radio Free Europe, which ordered every issue of the monthly and the Instytuts most important books (Tatrowski; Machcewicz).
For several decades, Kultura served as an informal center of research for
Polish and East-Central European affairs, a publishing house, an archive, a library, and an office documenting the history of Polish emigration. Between
1947 and 2000, Kultura published 512 titles with a total print run of five million. The words that Mieroszewski wrote already in 1954 remained pertinent
throughout Kulturas whole history:
Everything that was published whenever and wherever in Polish [] is collected, catalogued, and stored. Against the background of the current crisis in emigration, against
the background of the decay and collapse of so many authorities and institutions, the
fact that Kultura not only continues but is evolving takes on special significance. If our
journal was dependent on leaders, heads of state and parties, and other so-called agents,
they would have buried it long ago. Happily, Kultura is dependent on a wide circle of
Readers and friends. (Budujemy dom).
The publications of the Instytut Literacki were a primary source for independent magazines and publishing houses working outside the purview of the
censor. In the years 197790, 1,073 volumes of reprints of migr publications appeared in Poland, not counting magazines. Several hundred illegal
magazines benefited from reprinting what Kultura published in article or
book form years earlier (Supruniuk vols 1 and 2). Giedroyc gladly agreed to
the reprint of Kulturas books, insisting only that the copyright belonged to the
179
Instytut Literacki or that a payment of three percent of the profits be deposited to the account of the Kultura Fund in Poland. The most important
publishers collaborating with Kultura were NOWA (director Mirosaw Chojecki) and CDN (director Czesaw Bielecki). The authority and trust that Kultura earned in exile meant that international organizations and Polonia institutions abroad entrusted Giedroyc with funds to assist in Poland.
Giedroyc gave significant financial assistance to the Komitet Kultury Niezaleznej (Committee for Independent Culture) and the Fundusz Wydawnictw
Niezaleznych (Fund for Independent Publishers) in Poland. All magazines
that dealt with East-Central European issues benefited from Kulturas financial assistance; they included the Niepodlegosc (Independence), ABC, Nowa
Koalicja (New Coalition), Obz (Camp), and the Tygodnik Mazowsze (Mazovian
Weekly). The latter was published from around the beginning of the martial
law up until the elections in 1989, in a print run of approximately eighty thousand. Its editors launched in the Spring of 1989 the largest daily in Poland, the
Gazeta Wyborcza (Newspaper of the Electorate).
Most of the aid was directed to publishing houses in Warsaw, Cracow
(which was the largest recipient of books and printing equipment), Wrocaw,
and Poznan. In 198586, the program Video was launched in Paris, thanks
to which current affairs were documented on films that were then distributed
in Poland. From 1983 to 1987, when subscriptions to Kultura were at their
height, Giedroyc helped several dozen magazines, publishing houses, and organizations annually. Their subscriptions fluctuated. As Mirosaw Adam Supruniuk has calculated, the minimum monthly subsidy was thirty to fifty dollars; the organizations and the publishing houses received a one-time subsidy
of thousand to five thousand dollars, or five hundred to thousand dollars
monthly. These were very large sums then: the average salary in Poland was
approximately twenty to twenty-five dollars.
Kultura gave much support to Polish translations of scholarly and literary
works, particularly from East-Central Europe, and mostly Russian and Ukrainian literary works. By simultaneously publishing books from the West and
East, Giedroyc wanted to confront both experiences, and, above all, to show
the East European experience. Kultura was a mediator between East and West;
it was the first Polish publisher to issue many dissident Russian writers, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Andrej Sacharow, Andrei Amalrik, Andrei
Siniavski, and Iuri Daniel. Kultura also published Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Eugenio Reale, Aleksander Weisberg-Cybulski, Simone Weil, George
Orwell, Raymond Aron, Albert Camus, Graham Green, Aldous Huxley, Daniel Bell, Michel Garder, Jeanne Hersch, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, as well as
Milovan -Dilas, Boris Pasternak, Borys Lewickyj, Mihajlo Mihajlov, and others.
180
Several issues of Kultura appeared as monographs in other languages: the

Czech and Slovak issue of 1969/nr. 10 was dedicated to the 1968 invasion of
Czechoslovakia; a special supplement in the years 19521953 and a monograph issue in 1984 were in German; issues in Russian appeared in 1960, 1971,
and 1981. The special anthology Rozstrzelane odrodzenie (Executed Rebirth) was published in Ukrainian (awrynenko), and a Hungarian issue was
in the works but did not appear. Giedroyc also rallied Czech, Polish, Russian,
and Hungarian opposition activists to support declarations of independence
for the Ukraine. Though Kultura was located in France, no issue was prepared
in French; Poles belonging to the French intellectuals spread the word about
Kulturas significance ( Jelenski, Le Debat; K. Pomian, Les Amis de Kultura). In
February 1990, the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich bestowed an international prize on Kultura and its Czech sister exile journal Svedectv.
The most difficult period for Kultura came, paradoxically, after the fall of
Communism in 1989 and the lifting of censorship in Poland in April 1990.
Kultura lost its privileged independent position, and became one of many uncensored periodicals that shaped Polish public opinion. Its voice ceased to be
a reference point and the arbiter of national affairs. Kulturas authors now published also in Poland, and the long-anticipated materialization of the
monthlys political line had to confront the lightning-quick political transformations in new Poland. In the new political system, Kultura took more and
more often sides in Polands internal, often ideologized, discussions, while
former contributors distanced themselves from it.
From a journal focused on the exile, Kultura turned increasingly into a
national journal, as attested to not only by the issues it dealt with, but also by
the growing role of national authors. From a literary-societal monthly, it
transformed itself into a political periodical, although the editors never gave
up their cultural columns, especially that on literature (G. Pomian)
One could now purchase Kultura in Polands kiosks as one could other
newspapers and periodicals, but it could not increase significantly its readership. Nevertheless, the Polish intellectual elite read it, and so it was able to provoke and generate polemics in political and cultural affairs up to its very last
issue. In 1993, for example, it published a questionnaire entitled Pisarze niedocenieni/pisarze przecenieni (Undervalued Writers/Overvalued Writers),
modeled on a questionnaire in Le Figaro. It stirred up intense emotions by confrontating the private opinions of known critics with the official literary
canon. Kultura now also became a subject of interest to historians and artists.
Books began to be written about Kultura, anthologies were compiled of its articles (Tyrmand; Zostao; G.&K Pomian; G. Pomian), documentary films were
made about it (Agnieszka Holland; Kuczynski; Szczepanski), memoirs were
181
written by many writers (Zostao tylko sowo; O Kulturze;* Giedroyc Autobiogafia; Herling-Grudzinski and Bolecki Rozmowy w Dragonei). Giedroycs correspondence with Bobkowski, Gombrowicz, Jelenski, Miosz, Stempowski, and
Wankowski was published. Interviews appeared, scholarly articles, and bibliographies were published, conference sessions and exhibits were organized.
By the end of the 1990s, Kultura was a symbol of the most valued heritage of
the post-1945 Polish exile culture. After 1989, it became both trendy and
amusing in political circles to confess to the systematic reading of Kultura, a
matter that the post-communists Aleksander Kwasniewski and Lech Waesa
both admitted. Giedroyc kept his distance from these ritualistic declarations
of recognition. His symbolic gesture was to refuse a diploma bestowed on him
in 1989 by the Minister of Foreign Affairs for his service in disseminating of
Polish culture abroad, and his refusal to travel to Poland after the fall of Communism. Giedroyc died in 2000. According to his wishes, Kultura stopped publication after his death.
More than half a century of work made Kulturas output the most important
testimony concerning the exile attitudes towards Communism, independence, the fate of the East-Central European nations, international affairs,
western perceptions of post-Yalta Europe, as well as the evolution of the
communist system and society. Kultura also had a key role in acquainting
Polish readers with western Sovietology, and western economic, literary, and
cultural issues.
For several generations of Poles, Kultura became a symbolic rescue boat, a
raft that helped salvage the most valuable treasures of the national heritage
after the catastrophe of World War II. I am completely convinced, wrote
Baranczak, that if it were not for the books smuggled across the border, secretly circulated, borrowed for one night and feverishly absorbed, my generation would not have been capable of evading spiritual stunting.
Kultura, in Zbigniew Brzezinskis opinion, was a symbol of historical continuity and a weapon in the political battle. Furthermore, it was highly successful in both arenas. As a symbol of historical continuity, Kultura kept independent Polish political thought alive in times of unprecedented darkness.
Stalinism, even more than Hitlerism, was apparently capable of suppressing
fires and demoralizing the spirit. Kultura was a shelter and a road sign for
those who never lost hope in a free and democratic Poland. It became a symbolic continuation of the great exiles of the nineteenth century, preserving
thus a tradition that connected the history of Poland to Paris (G.& K. Pomian 83).
Kulturas power lay, however, in its opening of a Polish public discourse
about the future and about a new intellectual and moral challenge after World
182
War II, rather than about its ability to maintain historical continuity. Its Editorial Board and collaborators were witnesses to the contact between the eastern and western parts of Europe. Kultura confronted pre- and post-war
Poland from the European perspective, and Western Europe from an EastCentral European one. Its contributors described Poland and East-Central
Europe from the perspective that represented a cultural challenge to the
Western world. Kultura showed a society imprisoned after 1945 in a monoethnic bell-glass of national Communism, which was shielded from the standards and issues of Western societies: openness, multiculturalism, and tolerance. Its more than fifty years of output turned out to be a unique connection
between the historical experience of East-Central Europe and its opening
onto modernity.
Translated from the Polish by Diana Kuprel
Works Cited
Aron, Raymond. Mit spoeczenstwa bezklasowego(The Myth of Classless Society). Kultura 1948, nr. 8.
Aron, Raymond. Wielka schizma (The Great Schism). Kultura 1949, nr. 9.
Berberyusz, Ewa. Ksiaze z Maisons-Laffitte (The Prince of Maisons-Laffitte). Gdansk: Marabut, 1995.
Bobkowski, Andrzej. List (A Letter). Kultura 1948, nr. 910: 311.
Bobkowski, Andrzej. Pozegnanie (Farewell). Kultura 1948, nr. 6: 8293.
Bobkowski, Andrzej. Szkice pirkiem. Francja 19401944 (Sketches with a Quill: France
19401947). Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1957. Trad. Laurence Dyvre as En guerre et en paix.
Journal 19401944 (In War and Peace: Journal 19401944). Paris: Noir Sur Blanc, 1991.
Bochenski, Jzef Maria. Manifest demokratyczny (Democratic Manifesto). Kultura 1951,
nr. 9 (47): 317. Rpt. Giedroyc. Autobiografia na cztery rece. Ed. Krzysztof Pomian, 4th ed.
Warsaw: Towrzystwo Opieki nad Archiwum Instytutu Literackiego w Paryzu, 2006.
282303.
Burnham, James. The Struggle for the World. New York: John Day, 1947.
Chap-Nowakowa, Justyna. Sybir. Bliski Wschd. Monte Cassino. Srodowisko poetyckie 2. Korpusu i
jego twrczosc (Siberia, the Near East, Monte Cassino. Poet Community in the Second
Corps and its Writing). Cracow: Arcana, 2004.
Chruscinska, Iza. Bya raz Kultura Rozmowy z Zofia Hertz (Once there Was Kultura Conversations with Zofia Hertz). Warsaw: Most, 1994.
Danilewicz-Zielinska, Maria. Bibliografia. Vol 1. [Kultura 19581973. Zeszyty Historyczne (Historical Notebooks) 19631973. Dziaalnosc wydawnicza (Other Publishings) 19591973].
Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1975.
Danilewicz-Zielinska, Maria. Bibliografia. Vol 2. [Kultura 19741980. Zeszyty Historyczne
19741980. Dziaalnosc wydawnicza 19741980]. Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1981.
Danilewicz-Zielinska, Maria. Bibliografia. Vol 3. [Kultura 19811987. Zeszyty Historyczne
19811987. Dziaalnosc wydawnicza 19811987. Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1989.
183
-Dilas, Milovan. The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System. New York: Praeger, 1957.
Fabre-Luce, Alfred. Jak mogaby powstac Europa (How Europe Could Come Into
Being). Kultura 1949, nr. 7.
Fejto, Ferenc. Horoskopy Wschodnio-europejskie (A Horoscope of Eastern Europe).
Kultura 1954, nr. 5.
Florczak Zbigniew. Podrz na horyzonty ( Journey towards the Horizonts). Kultura 1949,
nr. 3.
Friszke, Andrzej. Zycie polityczne emigracji (Political Life of the Emigrants). Warsaw: Wiez,
1999.
Giedroyc, Jerzy and Andrzej Bobkowski. Listy 19461961 (Letters 194661). Ed. Jan Zielinski. Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1996.
Giedroyc, Jerzy and Jerzy Stempowski. Listy 19461969 (Letters 19461969). 2 vols. Ed.
Andrzej Stanisaw Kowalczyk. Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1998.
Giedroyc, Jerzy and Juliusz Mieroszewski. Listy 19491956 (Letters 194956). 2 vols. Ed.
Krzysztof Pomian. Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1999.
Giedroyc, Jerzy and Konstanty Aleksander Jelenski. Listy 19501987 (Letters 19501987).
Ed. Wojciech Karpinski. Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1995.
Giedroyc, Jerzy and Melchior Wankowicz. Listy 19451963 (Letters 19451963). Ed. Aleksandra Zikowska-Boehm. Warsaw: Czytelnik, 2000.
Giedroyc, Jerzy and Miosz Czesaw. Listy (Letters). Warsaw: Czytelnik, 2008.
Giedroyc, Jerzy and Witold Gombrowicz. Listy 19501969 (Letters 195069), Ed. Andrzej
Stanisaw Kowalczyk. Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1993.
Giedroyc, Jerzy. Autobiografia na cztery rece (Autobiography for Four Hands). Ed. Krzysztof
Pomian. Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1994.
Giedroyc, Jerzy. Rozmowa z Jerzym Giedroyciem sprzed dwunastu lat (Interview with
Jerzy Giedroyc held Twelve Years ago). Aneks 1986, nr. 44. Rpt. Zostao tylko sowo
6085.
Gombrowicz, Witold. Dziennik 19531956 (Diary 19531956). Paris: Instytut Literacki,
1971.
Gombrowicz, Witold. Slub (Marriage). Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1953.
Gombrowicz, Witold. Trans-Atlantyk. Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1953.
Gorczynska, Renata. Giedroyc literacki (Literary Giedroyc). Jerzy Giedroyc. Redaktor. Polityk. Czowiek ( Jerzy Giedroyc: Editor, Politician, and Man). Ed. Krzysztof Pomian. Lublin: Maria Curie-Skodowska UP, 2001. 6788.
Gorczynska, Renata. Wybr Zofii (Sophies Choice) Zeszyty Historyczne vol. 145 (2003).
Gorczynska, Renata. Portrety paryskie (Parisian Portraits). Cracow: Literackie, 1999.
Habielski, Rafa. Jerzy Giedroyc a stosunki polsko-zydowskie ( Jerzy Giedroyc and
Polish-Jewish Relations). Polska i zydowska inteligencja pierwszej poowy XX wieku (Poland
and the Jewish Intelligentsia of the First Half of the Twentieth Century). Ed. Dorota
Krawczynska. Warsaw: Instytut Badan Literackich, 2009 (forthcoming).
Habielski, Rafa. Laboratorium Kultury (Kulturas Laboratory). Wiez 2000, nr. 11.
Habielski, Rafal. Realizm, wizje i sny romantykw. O pisarstwie J. Mieroszewskiego
(Realism, Visions and Dreams of the Romantics. On the Writings of Juliusz Mieroszewski). Pref. in Mieroszewski, Fina klasycznej Europy 550.
Habielski, Rafa. Zycie spoeczne i kulturalne emigracji (The Social and Cultural Life of the Emigrants). Warsaw: Wiez, 1999.
Herling-Grudzinski, Gustaw, and Wodzimierz Bolecki. Rozmowy w Dragonei (Conversations
in Dragonea). Ed. Wodzimierz Bolecki. Warsaw: Szpak, 1997.
184
Herling-Grudzinski, Gustaw. Dzuma w Neapolu Relacja o stanie wyjatkowym (Plague in

Naples. Report on a State of Emergency). Kultura 1990 nr. 5: 2239. Rpt. Herling-Grudzinski, Opowiadania zebrine (Collected Short Stories). Ed. Zdzisaw Kudelski. Vol. 1. Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1999. 37898.
Herling-Grudzinski, Gustaw. Ksiegi Narodu i Pielgrzymstwa Polskiego na nowej emigracji (Books of the Polish Nation and its Pilgrimage to a New Emigration). Pref. to
Adam Mickiewicz. Ksiegi Narodu i Pielgrzymstwa Polskiego (Books of the Polish Nation and
its Pilgrimage). Rome: Instytut Literacki, 1946. 520.
Herling-Grudzinski, Gustaw. Nota o Brzozowskim (Commentary on Brzozowski). Stanisaw Brzozowski. Filozofia romantyzmu polskiego (The Philosophy of Polish Romanticism). Rome: Biblioteka Ora Biaego, 1945. 512.
Marek from the Polish Inny swiat. London: Gryf, 1953.
Herling-Grudzinski, Gustaw. Dziennik pisany noca 19712000 ( Journal Written at Night
19712000). 7 vols. Warsaw: Czytelnik, 19952000. Volcano and Miracle. A Selection From
the The Journal Written at Night. Sel. and trans. Ronald Strom. New York: Penguin, 1996.
Herling-Grudzinski, Gustaw. Najkrtszy przewodnik po sobie samym (The Shortest Guide to
Oneself). Ed. Wodzimierz Bolecki. Cracow: Literackie, 2000.
Herling-Grudzinski, Gustaw. Upiory rewolucji (Phantoms of Revolution). Warsaw: Enklawa,
1981.
Hertz, Aleksander. Zydzi w kulturze polskiej ( Jews in Polish Culture). Paris: Instytut Literackie, 1957.
Hertz, Zygmunt. Listy do Czesawa Miosza 19521979 (Letters to Czesaw Miosz). Ed.
Renata Gorczynska. Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1992.
Hasko, Marek. Cmentarze (Cemetery). Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1958.
Holland, Agnieszka, and Andrzej Wolski. Kultura (film). Producer: Media Kontakt, Paris,
1985.
Janta-Poczynski, Aleksander. Wracam z Polski (I Return from Poland). Kultura 1948, nr. 12.
Jelenski, Konstanty Aleksander. Kultura: La Pologne en exil (Kultura: Poland in Exile). Le
Debat 1981 nr. 9. Kultura: Polska na wygnaniu (Kultura: Poland in Exile). Aneks 1981,
nr. 2425.
Jelenski, Konstanty Aleksander. Mandaryni, komunizm, koegzystencja (Mandarins,
Communism, Coexistence). Kultura 1955, nr. 9.
Karpinski, Jakub. Taternictwo nizinne (Lowland Mountaineering). Paris: Instytut Literacki,
1988.
Kennan, George F. America and the Russian Future. Foreign Affairs 29 (195051): 35170.
Kerski, Basil, and Andrzej Stanisaw Kowalczyk. Wiek ukrainsko-polski. Rozmowy z Bohdanem
Osadczukiem (The Ukranian-Polish Century. Conversations with Bohdan Osadczuk).
Lublin: Marie Curie-Skodowska UP, 2001.
Kossowski, Andrzej. Instytut Literacki w Paryzu (The Instytut Literacki in Paris). Nowe
Ksiazki 1991, nr. 8.
Kossowski, Andrzej. Polskie oficyny wydawnicze na obczyznie (Polish Publishing Houses
Abroad). Warsaw: Biblioteka Narodowa, 1993.
Kolakowski, Leszek. Tezy o nadziei i beznadziejnosci (Theses about Hope and Hopelessness). Kultura 1971, nr. 6.
Kopczynski, Krzysztof. Przed przystankiem niepodlegosc: paryska Kultura i Kraj w latach
19801989 (Before We Got Independence: Giedroycs Kultura and Poland 19801989).
Warsaw: Wiez, 1990.
185
Korek, Janusz. Paradoksy paryskiej Kultury. Ewolucja mysli politycznej w latach 19471980 (The
Paradoxes of the Paris Kultura: The Evolution of Political Thought 19471980). Stockholm Slavic Studies nr. 27. Stockholm: Almquist and Wiksell, 1998.
Kowalczyk, Andrzej Stanisaw. Giedroyc i Kultura (Giedroyc and Kultura). Wrocaw: Dolnoslaskie, 1999.
Kowalczyk, Andrzej Stanisaw. Od Bukaresztu do Laffittw. Jerzego Giedroycia rzeczpospolita epistolarna (From Bucharest to Laffitte. The Epistolary Republic of Jerzy Giedroyc). Sejny:
Fundacja Pogranicze, 2006.
Kowalik, Jan. Kultura 19471957. Bibliografia & wydawnictwa 19461957 (Kultura 19471957.
Bibliography and Publications 19461957). Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1959.
Krl, Marcin. Style politycznego myslenia. Wok Buntu Modych i Polityki (Styles of Political
Thinking. About Revolt of the Youth and Polityka). Paris: Libella, 1979.
Kuczynski, Adam dir. Screenplan Wodzimierz Bolecki and Wojciechowski Piotr. Tratwa
Kultury (The Monthly Kultura as a Lifeboat). (film;3 x30 mins.). Producer Logos Media
and Polish Television, 1996.
Kudelski, Zdzisaw, ed. Spotkania z paryska Kultura (Encounters with Giedroycs Kultura).
Warsaw: Publishing Office Pomost, 1995.
Kultura i jej krag 19461986. Katalog wystawy czterdziestolecia Instytutu Literackiego. Biblioteka
Polska. Paris 11 XII 198610 I 1987 (Kultura and its Circle19461986. Exhibition Catalogue for the Fortieth Anniversary of the Instytut Literacki in the Biblioteka Polska.
Paris, December 11, 1986 January 10, 1987). Paris: Les Amis de Kultura, 1988. Lublin:
Marie Curie-Skodowska UP, 1995.
Laqueur, Walter. Kongres Wolnosci Kultury (The Congress for Cultural Freedom). Przeglad Polityczny 1997, nr. 3334.
awrynenko, Jurij, Rozstrilane widrodzenija (Executed Rebirth). Biblioteka Kultury no 37.
Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1959.
Leich, F.J. Great Expectations: The National Councils in Exile 19501960. The Polish Review 35.3 (1990).
Leitgeber, Witold. Polski Korpus Przysposobienia i Rozmieszczenia w swietle dokumentw
brytyjskich (Polish Cadet and Ordonnance Corps in Light of British Documents). Mobilizacja uchodzstwa do walki politycznej 19451990 (Mobilization of Refugees to Political Battle
19451990). Ed. Leonidas Kliszewicz. London: Pol. Tow. Naukowe na Obczyznie, 1995.
Lewandowska, Stanisawa. Prasa polskiej emigracji wojennej 19391945 (Polish War Emigration Press). Warsaw: Instytut Historii Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 1993.
Lipski, Leo. Dzien i noc (Day and Night). Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1957.
Machcewicz, Pawe. Monachijska menazeria. Walka z Radiem Wolna Europa (Political Menagerie in Munich. Battle against Radio Free Europe). Warsaw: IPN 2007.
Mackiewicz, Jzef. Niemiecki kompleks (German Complex). Kultura 1956, nr. 1. Rpt.
Jzef Mackiewicz and Barbara Toporska. Droga Pani (Dear Madam). London: Kontra,
1984. 82.
Mackiewicz, Jzef. Kontra. Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1957.
Maurer, Jadwiga. Moje lata z Kultura (My Years with Kultura). Pamietnik Literacki 1987,
nr. 11.
Mencwel, Andrzej. Przedwiosnie czy potop. Studium postaw polskich w XX wieku (Early Spring or
the Flood. A Study of Polish Attitudes in the Twentieth Century). Warsaw: Czytelnik,
1997.
Mieroszewski, Juliusz. ABC polityki Kultury (An ABC of Kulturas Politics). Kultura 1966,
nr. 4. Rpt. Fina klasycznej Europy 24454.
186
Mieroszewski, Juliusz. Budujemy dom (We Build our House). Kultura 1954, nr. 10.
Mieroszewski, Juliusz. Dwa fortepiany (Two Fortepianos). Kultura 1957, nr. 9: 36.
Mieroszewski, Juliusz. Lekcja wegierska (Hungarian lesson). Kultura 1956, no 12. Rpt. Mieroszewski, Fina klasycznej Europy 188.
Mieroszewski, Juliusz. List z wyspy (A Letter from an Island). Kultura 1951, nr 23. Rpt.
Mieroszewski, Fina klasycznej Europy 6066.
Mieroszewski, Juliusz. Niemcy (Germans ). Kultura 1954, nr. 4. Rpt. Mieroszewski,
Fina klasycznej Europy 12837.
Mieroszewski, Juliusz. O reforme zakonu polskosci (On the Reform of the Order of
Polishness). Kultura 1952, nr 4. Rpt. Mieroszewski, Fina klasycznej Europy 95102.
Mieroszewski, Juliusz. Rosyjski kompleks polski i obszar ULB (Russian Polish complex and ULB region). Kultura 1974, no 9. Rpt. Mieroszewski, Fina klasycznej Europy
35261.
Mieroszewski, Juliusz. Fina klasycznej Europy (The End of Classic Europe). Sel., ed. and
with pref. Rafa Habielski. Lublin: Marie Curie-Skodowska UP, 1997.
Miosz, Czesaw. By raz (There was Once ). Kultura 1980, nr. 3. Rpt. Zaczynajac od
moich ulic (Beginning with my Streets). Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1985; Zostao tylko sowo ;
Krzysztow Pomian et al, O Kulturze.
Miosz, Czesaw. Nie (No). Kultura 1951, no 5.
Miosz, Czesaw. Dolina Issy (Issa Valley). Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1955.
Miosz, Czesaw. Traktat poetycki (Treatise on Poetry). Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1957.
Miosz, Czesaw. Zdobycie wadzy (Seizure of Power). Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1955.
Miosz, Czesaw. Zniewolony umys (Captive Mind). Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1953.
Najder, Zdzisaw. Ile jest drg? (How Many Roads?). Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1982.
Pankowski, Marian. Smaga pogoda (Stormy Weather). Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1955.
Parnicki, Teodor. Koniec Zgody Narodw (The End of Understanding Nations). Paris: Instytut
Literacki, 1955.
Pomian, Grazyna, ed. Wizja Polski na amach Kultury 19471976 (Vision of Poland in the
Columns of Kultura). 2 vols. Lublin: UMCS, 1999.
Pomian, Grazyna. Lata Solidarnosci (The Years of the Solidarity Movement). Krzysztof
Pomian, ed. Jerzy Giedroyc 169180.
Pomian, Krzysztof et al. O Kulturze. Wspomnienia i opinie (On Kultura. Memories and
Opinions). London: Puls, 1987.
Pomian, Krzysztof, ed. Jerzy Giedroyc. Redaktor. Polityk. Czowiek ( Jerzy Giedroyc. Editor,
Politician, Man). Lublin: Marie Curie-Skodowska UP, 2001.
Pomian, Krzysztof. 13 grudnia 1981 (December 13, 1981). Kultura 1982, nr. 12: 1216.
Pomian, Krzysztof. W kregu Giedroycia (In Giedroycs Circle). Warsaw: Czytelnik, 2000.
Pospieszalski, Antoni. O religii bez namaszczenia (Writing on Religion without Taboos).
Krzysztof Pomian, ed. Jerzy Giedroyc 202208.
Ptasinska-Wjcik, Magorzata. Z dziejw Biblioteki Kultury 19461966 (On the Kultura
Books 19461966). Warsaw: IPN, 2006.
Rembek, Stanisaw. W polu (In Action). Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1958.
Rymkiewicz, Jarosaw Marek Umschlagplatz (Transfer Point [of Deportees]). Biblioteka Kultury nr. 435. Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1988.
Sharp, Samuel. Poland, White Eagle on a Red Field. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1953.
Skalmowski, Wojciech. Prywatne lektury Jerzego Giedroycia ( Jerzy Giedroycs Private
Lectures). Krzysztof Pomian, ed. Jerzy Giedroyc 209219.
Stempowski, Jerzy. Corona turrita. Kultura 1948, nr. 5.
187
Stempowski, Jerzy. Dziennik podrzy do Austrii i Niemiec (Diary of Travels to Austria and Germany). Rome: Instytut Literacki, 1946.
Stempowski, Jerzy. Od Berdyczowa do Rzymu (From Berdyczw to Rome). Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1971.
Stronska, Anna. Pisudczyk, ktrego pokochaa Litwa (Pisudskis Sympathizer Who
Was Loved by Lituania). Krzysztof Pomian, ed. Jerzy Giedroyc 22134.
Supruniuk, Mirosaw Adam. Kultura. Materiay do dziejw Instytutu Literackiego w Paryzu. Bibliografia dziaalnosci wydawniczej 19461990 Uzupenienia (Kultura. Materials on the Works
of the Instytut Literacki in Paris. Bibliography of the Publishing Activities 19461990.
Supplement). Torun: Mikoaj Kopernikus UP, 1994.
Supruniuk, Mirosaw Adam. Kultura. Materiay zrdowe do dziejw Instytutu Literackiego [t. 2],
Bibliografia przedrukw wydawnictw Instytutu Literackiego w Paryzu w niezaleznych oficynach wydawniczych w Polsce w latach 19771990 (Kultura. Source Materials on the Works of the Instytut Literacki. Vol. 2. Bibliography of the Reprints of the Instytut Literacki, Paris in Polands Independent Publishing Houses 19771990). Torun: Mikoaj Kopernikus UP,
1995.
Szaruga, Leszek. Przestrzen spotkania. Eseje o Kulturze paryskiej (Meeting Space. Essays on
the Parisian Kultura). Lublin: UMCS, 2001.
Szczepanski, Ignacy, ed. Kultura. 41 mins. film. Producer: Polish Televison, 1994.
Szczepanski, Ignacy, ed. Ostatnia rozmowa (Recent Conversations). 21 mins. film about Kultura. Producer: Polish Televison, 2004.
Tatrowski, K. Literatura i pisarze w programie Rozgosni Polskiej Radio Wolna Europa (Literature
and Writers in the Polish Broadcasting Program of Radio Free Europe). Cracow: Universitas, 2005.
Terlecki, Ryszard, ed. Aparat bezpieczenstwa wobec emigracji politycznej i Polonii (The Actions of
the Polish Communist Secret Police against the Polish Diaspora). Warsaw: IPN, 2005.
Tyrmand, Leopold, ed. Explorations in Freedom: Prose, Narrative, and Poetry from Kultura. New
York: Free Press, 1970.
Tyrmand, Leopold, ed. Kultura Essays. New York: Free Press, 1970.
Ulatowski, Jan. Inteligenckie herezje polityczne (Political Heresies of the Polish Inteligentia). Kultura 1948, nr. 5.
Wandycz, Piotr Stefan. Mieroszewski i Mieroszewscy (Mieroszewski and Mieroszewskis). Epilogue in Giedroyc & Mieroszewski Listy 19491956.
Wankowicz, Melchior. Klub Trzeciego Miejsca (Club of the Third Place). Kultura 1949,
nr. 6.
Wat, Aleksander. Mj wiek (My Century). London: Book Fund, 1977.
Winczakiewicz, Jan, ed. Izrael w poezji polskiej. Antologia (Israel in Polish Poetry. An Antology). Biblioteka Kultury nr. 26. Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1958.
Wraga, Ryszard. Ksiazki o Rosji (Books on Russia). Kultura 1948, nr. 4.
Wraga, Ryszard. Przymusowa praca w Rosji Sowieckiej (Forced Labor in Soviet Russia).
Kultura 1947, nr. 23.
Zbyszewski, Wacaw Alfred. Zagubieni romantycy (The Lost Romantics). Kultura 1959,
nr 10.
ebrowski, Marek. Dzieje sporu. Kultura w emigracyjnej debacie publicznej lat 19471956 (History
Z
of a Dispute. Kultura in the migr Public Debate 19471956). Warsaw: Towarzystwo
Opieki nad Archiwum Instytutu Literackiego w Paryzu, 2007.
Zietara, Pawel. Emigracja wobec pazdziernika. Postawy polskich srodowisk emigracyjnych wobec liberalizacji w PRL w latach 19551957 (Emigration in Relation to October. Attitudes of the
188
Polish migr Communities about the Liberalization in the Peoples Republic of Poland,
19551957). Warsaw: LTW, 2001.
Zostao tylko sowo Wybr tekstw o Kulturze paryskiej i jej twrcach (Only the Word Remained A Sel. of Texts about the Parisian Kultura and Its Creators). Lublin: FIS, 1990.
Polish World War II Veteran migr Writers in the US (Bogusaw Wrblewski)
189
Polish World War II Veteran migr Writers in the US:

Danuta Mostwin and Others
Bogusaw Wrblewski
1. The migr Veteran Generation

When World War II ended, an estimated 2.42.6 million of the Polish citizens
in 1939 found themselves outside the country, not including the Poles in the
USRR. Most of them were in Europe, tens of thousands on other continents,
and merely 1500 in the USA. These proportions changed significantly within
a few years because of two main reasons: firstly, because of repatriation, i.e.
voluntary or enforced return to the home country (uczak), and secondly, because the majority of Poles who did not agree to return to the communist Poland left for the other continents, mainly for the USA. (Figures in Habielski,
Pilch, Kubiak et al., as well as in Mostwins Emigranci, Transplanted Family, and
Trzecia wartosc)
Because of World War II, about 150,000 Poles settled in the United States
in the period from 1946 to the mid-50s. Most numerous among these immigrants between 93,000 and 100,000, including family members were those
who had fought against the Nazis on various fronts around the world, and
those who had participated in the Polish resistance during the wartime occupation. This is why they are generally classified as migr soldiers or veteranemigrants. The term acquired currency largely thanks to Danuta Mostwins
sociological studies Trzecia wartosc and Emigranci polscy. It should be stressed
that the semantic range of this term is certainly narrower than of the term
wartime migr (also called post-Yalta migr), which is used, for
example, by Andrzej Friszke in his study encompassing the political life of the
entire migr community (Zycie polityczne 12).
There were three principal sources of the postwar veteran emigration from Poland.
Firstly, there were Polish military units that fought together with the Allies on the western fronts (in 1945 there were over 200,000 soldiers in Western Europe; about 20,000
would eventually immigrate to the US, often with their families). Secondly, there were
about 35,000 displaced persons, such as prisoners of war from the September 1939
campaign and the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, forced laborers and prisoners of concentration
190
camps, who found themselves in 1945 in areas controlled by American, British, and
French troops. Thirdly, members of resistance organizations, and political activists who
decided to leave the country between 1945 and 1947, after the communist takeover of
Poland. The future trajectories of these displaced persons were often determined by their
origins and their reasons for emigrating. Before arriving in the US, many of them spent
some time in Britain, where the Polish Resettlement Corps was created in 1946 in order
to make it easier for the Poles to adapt to the new life conditions outside their home
country.
Arriving in the US, these veteran emigrants found they were part of a large
ethnic minority of Polish-Americans consisting of two distinct groups: descendants of political refugees who started coming to America after the first
partitioning of Poland in 1772 and continued after a series of unsuccessful
national uprisings in the first half of the 19th century; and the other group
consisted of economic immigrants that came in the period 18701914, and
their descendants. US Polonias level of education and self-consciousness was
not very high. Economic immigrants mostly came from the uneducated
classes, while the sons and daughters of political immigrants largely assimilated but inherited old country customs from their parents and grandparents.
The majority of them learned the basics of Polish language in Sunday schools.
The local parish was very often the only social institution that brought together the members of Polonia, although it should be noted that a number of
self-help associations and cultural organizations came into being at the turn
of the century. This is particularly important since the economic immigrants
did not actually come to America with a strong sense of ethnic identity. Attachment to the place from which they came the village and the local
church was what connected them most vividly with the home country. Their
ethnic awareness based on Polands history developed only after they had
settled in America.
In contrast to those earlier immigrants, the post-World War II veterans, a
significant proportion of whom were commissioned and non-commissioned
officers, were relatively well-, and often highly-, educated. 27 % of the soldiers had university degrees, 20 % had begun university studies, and 23 % had
liceum (high school) diplomas. Among them were also quite a few writers
and journalists. Their arrival in the US inevitably had a visible impact on the
life of Polonia when they joined the Polish writers who had come to the US
during the war years: Jan Lechon, Kazimierz Wierzynski, Jzef Wittlin, and
the scholar-historian of literature Manfred Kridl. Czesaw Miosz came to the
US in 1960. Strictly speaking, these writers cannot be classified as veteran
immigrants because they did not directly participate in the military struggle
with the Nazis, although they can certainly be called wartime immigrants.
All of them had established a literary reputation before the war, and they had
191
experience in living abroad before coming to the US. In contrast to the poets
who started their literary career after having left the home country, these
writers tried to settle at institutions on the East Coast. They also had strong
support in London, where a friend of theirs, Mieczysaw Grydzewski edited a
prestigious emigration weekly, the Wiadomosci. Nevertheless, Jan Lechon
could not withstand the pressures of migr life and committed suicide in
1956 in New York. Kazimierz Wierzynski was a great authority for young
poets who immigrated to the US. Surviving correspondence shows that they
frequently turned to him in literary and practical matters. In turn, they helped
publishing Wierzynskis collected poems in 1959 by promoting special subscriptions. Traces of this can be found in Zbigniew Chakos archive in Chicago, now in the Warsaw Rising Museum.
The post-World War II migr veterans were the first since the time of
Kosciuszko and Puaski, who belonged mostly to the intelligentsia and were
relatively well educated. These migrs could have played an important role in
American politics, had they not thought that they were only temporarily in the
US, and had they not been creating Poland outside Poland. This position
was supported by the Polish Government in Exile, which was created in London during the war. Though the US and Great Britain withdrew their recognition on July 56, 1945, it continued to exert significant influence on Polish
consciousness abroad.
A number of other important figures connected with international (and especially Polish-American) politics belonged to this group of migrs. They include Jan Nowak-Jezioranski, an advisor of the US National Security Council,
and Jan Karski, the legendary courier who brought the report about German
atrocities against Polish Jews to the West. Lesser-known members of this
group included, for instance, the historian Jerzy Lerski, professor at the University of San Francisco.
In general, soldier-immigrants did not fully use their intellectual potential
as Americans, but their generation provided a strong cultural support for the
Polish ethnic group in the US. Only 2.8 million people acknowledged their
Polish roots in 1960 a few years after the main wave of the post-Yalta
migrs to the US came to an end. However, according to the Bureau of Census, more than 8.2 million people claimed to have a Polish background twenty
years later (Mostwin, Trzecia wartosc 5). By 1980 the epoch of Polish jokes
had ended. Apart from the general trend of discovering ones roots, it happened thanks to the twenty-years presence of veteran migrs in the US, the
growing popularity of John Paul II (who also was a peer of the veteranmigrs), and the beginning of the anti-communist movement led by Solidarnosc (Solidarity).
192
The social situation and the public activity of the post-World-War II veteran-migrs generation can be analyzed both through the documents of literary life (correspondence, migr periodicals, and documentation of editorial work) and through interpretations of their literary works. We shall look
at six writers: the poets Zbigniew Chako, Jan Kowalik and Jan Leszcza, and
the prose writers Danuta Mostwin, Zygmunt Haupt and Pawe ysek. They
shared three things: 1) their similar wartime experiences illustrate the three
circumstances that led Polish veterans to immigrate to the US: Haupt and
ysek were army veterans, Chako, Kowalik and Leszcza were displaced persons, and Danuta Mostwin was a political refugee as well as a veteran of the
Warsaw Uprising; 2) born between 1907 and 1921, they were relatively young
when they settled in the US; and 3) they had no literary reputations when they
arrived in the US; all of them published their first books with migr presses,
which significantly shaped their artistic identities and their choice of audience.
These criteria (common war and postwar experience, youth, and similar
time and circumstances of literary debut) define the generational identity of a
group of writers as first formulated in Kazimierz Wykas seminal study Pokolenia Literackie (Literary Generations). Especially applicable are his terms generational unity, taken from Karl Mannheim, and generational experience.
This generation found itself under great pressure to assimilate. However,
several of them resisted, seeking support in their ethnic group, especially in
Chicago, where the Polish community was the most numerous. The process
of assimilation ran more smoothly in the case of prose writers, and less so in
the case of poets. Danuta Mostwin and Pawe ysek had no great problems in
finding work at East-Coast universities. Another prose writer, Zygmunt
Haupt, found employment at Voice of Americas Polish section. On the other
hand, poets Zbigniew Chako and Jan Leszcza, who lived in Chicago and
could not (or did not want to) write in English, were forced to take on bluecollar jobs to earn a living. Jan Kowalik is an interesting case because he
worked at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, California as a physical laborer
before he was appreciated as a bibliographer who undertook such useful US
tasks as the bibliography of Helena Modrzejewska [Modjeska] or the American reception of Pope John Paul II.
In 2001 I studied Jan Kowaliks archive, which he entrusted to the Hoover
Institution shortly before he died. I found there a collection of letters written
to him by his younger friend Jan Leszcza. The letters recount a superb migr
epic. They show how at the outset in 1946 the two authors discovered a generational unity among themselves in DP camps. Their bond was strengthened
by their common homeland Silesia, and, of course, their common love for lit-
193
erature. After a few months, they were on first-name terms and conducted
heated discussions about literary life and literature, especially about the significance of literary tradition. In 1947, they also corresponded about organizational matters related to the Polish Literary Club they had founded. In
1948, they came to decide to emigrate, they exchanged bitter opinions about
the American occupation zone and uncompromising judgments about Germans and their collective responsibility. The letters dating from 1949 show
the gradual disintegration of the community, weakening literary activity, and
preparations to travel further westward. In 1950, when Leszcza had to do
hard physical work in his new home, Chicago, he complained that he lacked
motivation to create and that he had difficulties with finding a poetic expression adequate to his new experiences. He also encountered problems
while trying to build a literary community. Finally, he was invited to California, where he met with Jan Kowalik and found a relatively stable existence in
Los Altos, CA, in 1959.
Curiously, these poets settled in Chicago and eventually in California, while
the prose writers found their place on the US East Coast. The reason may be
fairly simple: the majority of educational and scientific institutions that dealt
with European ethnic issues while preparing teaching and research projects
were located on the East Coast; the experience and potential of well-educated
European immigrants was then useful. Moreover, many bilingual PolishAmerican periodicals, radio stations, and other mass media functioned on the
East Coast, and Polish immigrants could cooperate with them. Poets, however, sought self-fulfillment in the Polish language community, preserving as
much as possible from pre-war times whatever harmonized with their traditional poetics. They were satisfied with monolingual Polish mass media, because lyrical expression is generally more difficult to transpose into a new language than narrative prose. Such a monolingual Polish community existed in
Chicago, and when the poets moved to California they continued to sympathize with this center rather than with that of New York or Washington D.C.
2. The East-Coast Novelists

The literary output of Danuta Mostwin, who resides in Baltimore, is the most
extensive among the authors I am discussing. She wrote nine novels, two
short story collections, and several volumes of sociological essays and studies,
written both in Polish and English. For a number of reasons, Mostwins work
is of key importance in verifying my thesis about the impact of the veteran
emigration in the shaping Polonias awareness of its ethnic identity in recent
194
decades. In the stories included in Asteroidy (1965) and in other works she describes typical Polish emigrants, often drawing on her experiences as a social
worker in Baltimores Department of Social Services during the late 1950s. It
was then that she got to know many turn-of-the-century economic emigrants,
old and lonely people who had experienced many hardships in their lives. In
her novels Ameryko! Ameryko! (1961), Ja za woda, ty za woda (1972), and Odchodza moi synowie (1977) she deals directly with problems faced by the generation of migr veterans, following them from their arrival in America,
through their assimilation in the new environment, to their childrens difficulties with maintaining their ethnic identity. Some of Mostwins texts were serialized in Polish periodicals published in the US and thus reached wider audiences. Further below I shall discuss in detail the subject matter of Danuta
Mostwins writings and her way of thinking about the world, which are particularly significant for the overall picture of the veteran immigrant generation.
Zygmunt Haupt, who lived in New York and Washington, D.C., was less
prolific than Mostwin, but his work is of equal interest. Besides writing short
stories and memoirs, which he published in Pierscien z papieru (1963) and Szpica
(1989), he also exhibited paintings in Baltimore, Atlanta, and other American
cities. He worked for seven years at the Polish section of Voice of America,
and he was for more than a dozen years an Editorial Board member of
America, a monthly published by the USIA and distributed in Poland. His journalistic essays and extensive professional and private correspondence are a
rich source of information about the position of Polish-Americans within
American society. Upon the initiative of Andrzej Stasiuk and Aleksander
Madyda at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, who are conducting
research on Haupts literary work, Czarne publishing house has recently reissued both of Haupts books in Poland.
Pawe ysek started his studies in England after the conclusion of the war.
He completed his studies in the US with an M.A. degree (1949) and an M.S.
degree in Library Science (1951). As of 1952, he was a librarian as well as a
teacher of literature at Queens College of the City University of New York,
and he became full professor in 1974. ysek organized a Polish Club at
Queens College, and he started to write in the early sixties memoirs and
novels based on the folklore of the Beskidy Mountains, from where his family
came. Some of his works, for instance Twarde zywobycie Jury Odcesty, are written
in the Silesian dialect. He published reviews in Books Abroad and later in World
Literature Today. In 1974, ysek received the Award of the Koscielscy Foundation in Geneva for his novels. Contrary to Haupt, ysek frequently returned to Poland, starting in the mid-sixties.
195
3. Chicago and California Poets

Poets associated with the post-World War II veteran emigration usually followed the Polish literary conventions of the 1920s and 30s. Their conservative approach to poetry satisfied the expectations of the older Polonia
audience, as well as of the new immigrants. Such was the poetry of Zbigniew
Chako, who lived in Chicago and published two volumes of poetry, Jaworowe
niebo (1962) and Strofy staromiejskie (1977). During short research trips in the
1990s, Chakos widow opened his personal archives for me, and I was thus
able to publish his collected poems in Don pena snw (1997). His writings
closely reflect the issues that were of direct interest to the largest group of
Polish-Americans, namely the Chicago Polonia. Chako was very active in
organizing the cultural life of Poles in Chicago; he initiated, for example, the
so-called Live Literary Dailies and was among the founders of the Home Army
Veterans Club and the Friends of Warsaw Club. In his memoirs and poems he
repeatedly wrote about Warsaw, and he assembled in his private library what
was probably the biggest collection of Varsoviana outside Poland, a collection
that was open to anyone interested in it. As a poet, Chako was unable to see a
bright side in migr life: With a foot losing track / foot like lead / we take
root in foreign ground / for dream and eternity / snow makes the bed for us /
from feathers of manic angles / the sky with a crunch falls down the coffins
lid (Don 89).
Jan Leszcza was Chakos close friend and collaborator when he lived in
Chicago between 1951 and 1959. He published four volumes of poetry, two
of which, Konie drewniane (1967) and Trzy sciany (1980), are particularly interesting. He also translated English-language poetry into Polish and maintained
close contacts with Polonia activists in California and Chicago. Part of his literary output is still waiting to be published in book form. It can be inferred
from the Leszczas mentioned correspondence that he was highly critical of
the Polish migr community in Chicago. He expressed his beliefs publicly in
Live Literary Dailies, which he created together with Chako and Jzef Biaasiewicz, a journalist belonging to the same generation. Leszcza translated
American, German, and Czech literature into Polish, which appeared in
migr periodicals. He frequently asked in his poetry whether history has any
meaning, which was typical of his generation: The history will verify who
existed and who did not / always horizontally blood runs and turns into water
at once (Trzy sciany 8).
Jan Kowalik, who was the first of the veteran migr poets to settle in
California, published several poetry chapbooks in the US. In 1994 I collected
them, together with his more recent poems, in Wiersze wybrane, a volume pub-
196
lished in Poland. No less important is Kowaliks monumental five-volume

bibliography, World Index of Polish Periodicals Published outside Poland since September 1939, which lists over 4,500 titles, including a significant number of periodicals published in the US. Kowalik also worked for several California radio
stations and was on the editorial board of San Franciscos periodical Migrant
Echo. He also published several thematic bibliographies in English, for
example a bibliography of Helena Modjeska (1977) and The Polish Press in
America (1978), which were important for American culture in general, not
only for the Polish immigrant cultural enclave.
The predominant emotional feature of Kowaliks poetry is an eternal longing for Poland: Prepare an obolus / I want to die with the September / Poland under my eyelid / Charon will take me there (Wiersze 104). Kowaliks activities were unusual, for attempts to create institutions of migr literary life
(periodicals, meetings with the authors, literary groups and clubs, literary
prizes) were usually limited to a Polish context. Poets of his generation rarely
addressed their work to members of other ethnic groups.
The greatest paradox is that these writers found themselves in a double exclusion: exclusion from the all-American culture, to which they condemned
themselves by regarding assimilation as a treason of national ideals, and exclusion from the culture of post-war Poland, because communist censorship
prohibited the publication of their works. Note that the same writers later
consented to the assimilation of their childrens generation by expressing, for
instance, pride in their children who became brilliant doctors (Mostwins case)
or American army officers stationing in Europe within the NATO forces
(Chakos case).
However, if we regard American culture as a melting pot, and if we look at
Polish culture from a long-term perspective, we can say that these authors belonged to both American and Polish culture, even though their impact on the
latter was for a long time very limited: under the communist regime, neither
their own works not critical studies on them could be legally published or
circulated. Today the works of these migr veterans are brought back to
Poland, enriching the Polish literary tradition and revealing at the same time a
particularly interesting dimension of American life since World War II. One
would wish only for a faster and more ready recognition of the importance of
the migr culture.
197
4. The Third Value

Danuta Mostwins literary output is closely connected with her life as a representative of the veteran migr generation, but also with the scholarly work
she wrote as a sociologist and social psychologist.
Her first novels, Dom starej lady (The House of the Old Lady; 1958) and
Ameryko! Ameryko! (America! America! 1961), dealt directly with the postWorld War II migrs who refused to return to communist-ruled Poland and
tried to adopt a new life away from the homeland, first in England towards the
end of the 1940s, and later in the US. However, their adaptation remained incomplete, for they continued to live with a patriotic sense of heroic mission
that propelled them during the war, hoping that the geopolitical situation
would change. They were looking for short-term rather than long-term strategies of survival. Their social position in prewar Poland had been definitely
higher than the one they came to occupy in the country in which they settled.
The good general education they brought from Poland would have been sufficient to improve their situation in a new country if only their determination
was higher, and they accepted the choice to emigrate for good. Mostwin lampooned this impasse in the novel Ja za woda, ty za woda(You and I Beyond the
Water; 1972) with grotesque means of expression, especially in the crowd
scenes that can be compared to the literary pictures that Witold Gombrowicz
created in his famous novel Trans-Atlantyk (1953).
The similarity between the two authors is visible both in worldview and literary technique. In Trans-Atlantyk, Gombrowicz saw the Polish Romantic
tradition as a burden overpowering his contemporaries, depriving Poles of
their own creative abilities. This was especially evident from abroad, from
Gombrowiczs Argentina and from Mostwins US.
Mostwins next novel, Cien ksiedza Piotra (Father Peters Shadow; 1985), was
completely different. Here, the characters history reaches back into the nineteenth century. The novel can be described as historical, for it contains no
migr themes, and the Romantic tradition returns in a slightly idealized
way. Nevertheless, it retains an autobiographical element, for the novel tells a
story of Mostwins family, and her ancestors serve as prototypes for her characters.
At this time, the notion of a duality in Mostwins literary output surfaced in
the critical literature on her writings. Ewa Nowakowska recognized Dom starej
lady and Cien ksiedza Piotra as extreme points in Mostwins literary path (Z
perspektywy Broadwayu 114). Alina Kochanczyk sees the problem from a
different perspective by considering writing about the distant past as a
method to save ones identity (see also Kochanczyks Long Journey Home):
198
In the case of an emigrant cut off from the homeland heritage, the feeling of uprooting is
reinforced. When the past is becoming unclear, an emigrant is deprived of a part of his
being. Since the days of Proust we know that literature may be an effective aid in search
of lost time. By the same token, the author of Cien ksiedza Piotra has used the creative
power of memory in her own characteristic way. She made an attempt to record her
life that was inevitably being pushed into the past by time; [it was] an attempt to reach the
deepest sources of her tradition by means of literature. Looking back into the past considerably further than her memory could grasp, Danuta Mostwin reconstructed the
family history on her mothers side, seeking for everything that had been contributing to
her sense of identity for years. ( Sowo 24)
Indeed, Danuta Mostwins subsequent novels Szmaragdowa zjawa (The

Emerald Phantom; 1988), Tajemnica zwyciezonych (The Secret of the Defeated;
1992) and Nie ma domu (There Is No Home; 1996) fill the space between
what is historical and what contemporary. It can be said that the six novels
over a half of Mostwins literary output constitute a great saga of the authors family. The story begins with the generation of great-grandfathers in the
1860s, and ends with the American present day of the veteran migr generation in the 1960s. The short stories from the volume Sysze jak spiewa
Ameryka (I Can Hear America Singing; 1998) take the history of emigration
up to the early nineties.
Many critics and literary historians commented on the literary picture of
emigration drawn by Danuta Mostwin. Stanislaus A. Blejwas expresses the
most characteristic opinion:
Mickiewicz and others writer-prophets under the influence of Messianism created in
order to keep the spirit of the Great Emigration alive. The theme of their works was Poland, presented in a sentimental way as it was in Pan Tadeusz, or the current Polish political crises, the history in the process of happening, as Miosz described the motifs appearing in Slowackis dramas. However, after 1863 when peasants started to leave the
Polish land for good the phenomenon of emigration brought new, realistic themes. It
gave writers a chance to present it in an epic way, as O.E. Rolvaag did in relation to the
Scandinavians. On the other hand, Polish literature produced Henryk Sienkiewiczs
bitter melodrama Za chlebem and Latarnik a solemn story about patriotic self-alienation.
At the same time there was material for great literature. As Jerzy Jedlicki noticed in a different context, America became the topic of the most popular literary form emigration
letters. Nevertheless, Polish writers, including American writers of Polish origin, did not
try to deal with the topic of emigration drama and cultural transplantation. Danuta
Mostwin is the first writer whose works take up the opportunities created for literature
by emigration and transplantation. ( Przeszczepieni 29)
The story of Danuta Mostwins family saga encompasses a period of over one
hundred years. Its outcome is the moment at which political exiles after World
War II turn into permanent emigrants to the US. After 1989 Poland gained
full independence and democratically elected a new government. There were
199
no more political reasons to prevent one from returning home. But after forty
years in exile one would have to build a new life from scratch. It would be
difficult to leave loved ones in the US: the children who were born here and
the friends who decided to stay. History, like Moses, led the Mostwin family
out of Europe due to communism, but America did not become their promised land.
Next to this saga, Danuta Mostwin has written many short stories that portray the generation of economic emigration, which came to the US earlier.
They were gathered in the collections Asteroidy (Asteroids; 1965) and Odkrywanie Ameryki (Discovering America; 1992). Mostwins own experiences
played a huge role in shaping both the saga and the stories. Since they are to a
considerable degree autobiographical, it is important to reconstruct her biography in a few sentences.
Danuta Mostwin was born in Lublin in 1921. Her father was an officer in
the Polish Army. She lived in Lublin until 1930, later in Warsaw, where she finished in 1939 the Emilia Plater Gymnasium. During German occupation, she
participated in the resistance movement and she studied medicine at the
underground Warsaw University. In January 1945 she married Stanisaw
Bask-Mostwin, a courier of the Polish government in exile, who had been
parachuted to occupied Poland a year earlier for a secret mission. His lot was
the inspiration for Danutas novel Tajemnica zwyciezonych.
Because communist special forces started to be interested in Danutas husband, the couple found its way illegally through Czechoslovakia to Scotland,
where Danutas father was as an officer of the Polish armed forces in the
West. In 1948 Danuta Mostwin obtained her certificate at the Paderewski
Teaching Hospital School of Medicine. She left England in 1951 and settled
for good with her husband and their son Jacek in Baltimore on the US East
Coast.
In Baltimore, Danuta Moswin worked as a social worker. She acquired an
M.A. in the social sciences at the Catholic University of America in Washington D.C, and in 1971 a Ph.D. at Columbia University with a dissertation supervised by Margaret Mead. Her dissertation on the social adjustment of Polish
immigrants in the U.S. after World War II was published in 1980 as The Transplanted Family. Between 1969 and 1980 she was professor of social work and
family mental health at the National Catholic School of Social Service of the
Catholic University of America. 196181 she ran mental health centers for
families in the psychiatric hospitals of Johns Hopkins University and the
Spring Grove Medical Center in Maryland. In 1980 Mostwin set up a family
mental health specialization in the psychological department of Loyola College in Maryland. She retired in 1987.
200
The education she received, as well as her life and professional experience
enabled Danuta Mostwin to become a master of psychological portraits in literature, not only in the case of protagonists, but also when representing
minor characters. We remember her literary figures; we can recall their images
long after we have finished reading, as if we had really met them. The portraits
of characters created by Mostwin are versatile and synthetic at the same time.
For her, a human being is a psychophysical unit, and a single characteristic
gesture, grimace, word, or behavior says more about her figures than
hundreds of analytical or descriptive sentences.
Among her main characters, the female figures are most memorable. For
example, she created in the novel Odchodza moi synowie (My Sons Are Leaving; 1977) an expressive image of an alienated woman. Two aspects of her
personality personified in the Wanda and Rza voices carry on an argument in internal dialogues. This immigrant woman is so busy with her professional career in the US that she loses her chance for a successful emotional life.
Subtle individual character psychology goes hand in hand with mastery in
creating collective scenes. Although the individual remains the central point
of the situation, a special atmosphere, typical of collective experiences is created around the individual, and this affects the reader as well. The most telling
examples are the scene in which Ignacy Paderewski enters Poznan (Tajemnica
zwyciezonych), Jzef Pisudskis funeral (Szmaragdowa zjawa), and Stanisaw Mikoajczyks arrival in Warsaw (Nie ma domu) crucial moments in Polands
twentieth-century history.
Mostwin continues the best traditions of the great Polish women novelists,
of Eliza Orzeszkowa in the second half of the nineteenth century and Maria
Dabrowska in the first half of the twentieth). As Irena Sawinska writes:
Certainly she is closer to Orzeszkowa than Dabrowska; but Mostwins horizons are
broader, the scale of her experiences and observations are greater, and her intellectual
formation is incomparable. Nevertheless, she is close to Orzeszkowa in being curious
of every person, creative imagination, respect for every suffering. ( Fascynujaca to
przygoda 34)
Essential knowledge about the sources of Mostwins writing can be gained

from two volumes of sociological sketches published in Polish: Trzecia wartosc
(The Third Value) published in 1985 (enlarged, uncensored ed. 1995) and
Emigranci polscy w USA (The Polish migrs in the USA, published in 1991).
Third Value, which characterizes the optimal spiritual condition of an exile,
has meanwhile entered the register of important sociological terms. What
does it precisely mean?
201
The American theory of the melting pot, in which all nationalities and cultural values are
blended into one American mass, was inspired by inflexible Aristotelian philosophy. An
migr either adopted new values, cutting himself off from the past, and becoming a
newborn man, an American, or according to this theory rejected melting in the pot,
closing himself off in an ethnic ghetto. As a result, an migr resembled an American
from outside, afraid of being suspected of otherness, but internally he remained himself,
unchanged. And, as a result, it frequently happened that his process of internal development stopped. [] The third value is a result of a creative, not a mechanical process. [] Process, which starts, but does finish, with the first generation of emigrants.
This is a long process of creating ones otherness. We experience it, contending with the
dilemma of loyalty and difficulties in communicating with the environment, having to
deal with the lack of satisfaction, as well as with unjustified it would seem feeling of
guilt, before the third value starts to emerge. The third value is an intermediate form between
identification with the home and the host countries. (Trzecia wartosc 1819)
Twenty years later, Mostwin modified and broadened this definition significantly:
The third value is energy generated as a result of the confrontation between the values of
an individual and that of a new system. [] Confrontations and solving the crises are subsequent phases of learning, improving knowledge about the new system and about oneself. It leads to a new, richer way of thinking, increased independence and consciousness
of ones development. Consciousness of ones own development and confrontation with
oneself this is the third value. The process of the third value is not limited to the situation of
an immigrant. It may develop in a situation in which an individual is confronted with another, alien, and even hostile civilization, social structure, or philosophy. (Trzecia wartosc
23536)
Mostwin takes up similar issues also in her works in English: in the abovementioned doctoral dissertation and publications in specialist periodicals, e.g.
Social Casework and Migration World.
It may be said that Danuta Mostwin herself is a living example of how the
third value is formed. Her biography as well as her literary and scholarly
output became a synthesis of elements from the Polish and American cultures. The effect of this synthesis is greater than just a simple sum of values
that emerge from simultaneously functioning in two different societies. Jerzy
Zubrzycki called this in Whither Emigracja? a synergy effect. Danuta Mostwin has managed to assimilate without losing her Polish identity, something that other young writers starting as Polish migrs were unable to
achieve.
The sociological and anthropological dimensions of Mostwins work are
connected with her important academic accomplishments. Equipped with
methodological tools that she first tested in her doctoral dissertation, she
conducted extensive surveys of US Polonia in 1970, 1984, and 1994, focusing
on relations between the old and the new immigrants. The mere fact that she
202
undertook a serious study of the Polish minority in America probably influenced the ethnic self-awareness of many Polish-Americans. Many responses to Mostwins questions reveal that her research stimulated self-reflection in a Polish community on its way to the third value.
Works Cited
Blejwas, Stanislaus A. Przeszczepieni (The Transplanted). Akcent 4 (1993): 2932.
Chako, Zbigniew. Don pena snw (wiersze zebrane). (Hand Full of Dreams. Collected Poems).
Ed. Bogusaw Wrblewski. Lublin: Test, 1997.
Chako, Zbigniew. Jaworowe niebo (The Sycamore Sky). London: Oficyna Poetw i Malarzy,
1962.
Chako, Zbigniew. Strofy staromiejskie (Old-Town Verses). New York: Poray, 1977.
Friszke, Andrzej. Zycie polityczne emigracji polskiej 19451990 (Political Life of the Polish
migr Community), Warsaw: Biblioteka Wiezi, 1999.
Gombrowicz, Witold. Trans-Antlantic (Transatlantic). Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1953.
Habielski, Rafa. Zycie spoeczne i kulturalne emigracji (Social and Cultural Life of the Emigrants). Warsaw: Biblioteka Wiezi, 1999.
Haupt, Zygmunt. Pierscien z papieru (A Ring of Paper). Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1963.
Haupt, Zygmunt. Szpica (Picket). Ed. Renata Gorczynska. Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1989.
Kochanczyk, Alina. Sowo o Danucie Mostwin (A Few Words on Danuta Mostwin).
Miedzy Lublinem i Baltimore. Dorobek literacki i naukowy Danuty Mostwin. (Between Lublin
and Baltimore. Literary and Scientific Output of Danuta Mostwin). Ed. Ewa os and
Bogusaw Wrblewski. Lublin: Muzeum Lubelskie, 1997.
Kochanczyk, Alina. Danuta Mostwin: Long Journey Home. Something of My very Own to
Say. American Women Writers of Polish Descent. Ed. Thomas S. Gladsky and Rita Holmes
Gladsky. Boulder, Colorado, East European Monographs. Distr. Columbia UP, 1997.
203223.
Kowalik, Jan. Modjeska. Bibliography. San Jos: American-Polish Documentation Studio,
1977.
Kowalik, Jan. The Polish Press in America. San Francisco: R. and E. Research Associates, 1978.
Kowalik, Jan. Wiersze wybrane (Selected Poems). Ed. Bogusaw Wrblewski. Lublin: Norbertinum, 1994.
Kowalik, Jan. World Index of Polish Periodicals Published outside Poland since September 1939. 5 vols.
Lublin: Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski, 197688.
Kubiak, Hieronim, Eugeniusz Kusielewicz, and Tadeusz Gromada, ed. Polonia amerykanska.
Przeszosc i wspczesnosc (American Polonia. The Past and the Present). Wrocaw: Zakad
Narodowy im. Ossolinskich, 1988.
Leszcza, Jan. Konie drewniane (Wooden Horses). London: Oficyna Poetw i Malarzy, 1967.
Leszcza, Jan. Trzy sciany (Three Walls). London: Oficyna Poetw i Malarzy, 1980.
uczak, Czesaw. Polacy w okupowanych Niemczech 19451949 (Poles in Occupied Germany
19451949). Poznan: Pracownia Serwisu Oprogramowania, 1993.
ysek, Pawe. Twarde zywobycie Jury Odcesty. London: Polska Fundacja Kulturalna, 1970.
Trans. L. Krzyzanowski as The Hard Life of Jura Odcesty. London: Poets and Painters
Press, 1980.
203
Mostwin, Danuta. Ameryko!, Ameryko! (America! America!). Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1961.
Mostwin, Danuta. Asteroidy (Asteroids). London: Polska Fundacja Kulturalna, 1965.
Mostwin, Danuta. Cien ksiedza Piotra (Father Peters Shadow). Warsaw: PAX, 1985.
Mostwin, Danuta. Dom starej lady (The House of the Old Lady). London: Veritas, 1958.
Mostwin, Danuta. Emigranci polscy w USA (Polish Immigrants in the USA). Lublin: Katolicki
Uniwersytet Lubelski, 1991.
Mostwin, Danuta. Ja za woda, ty za woda. (You and I on the Other Side of the Water). Paris:
Instytut Literacki, 1972.
Mostwin, Danuta. Nie ma domu (There Is no Home). Lublin: Norbertinum, 1996.
Mostwin, Danuta. Odchodza moi synowie (My Sons Are Leaving). London: Polska Fundacja
Kulturalna, 1977.
Mostwin, Danuta. Odkrywanie Ameryki (Discovering America). Lublin: Norbertinum, 1992.
Mostwin, Danuta. Szmaragdowa zjawa (The Emerald Phantom). Warszawa: Instytut Wydawniczy Pax, 1988.
Mostwin, Danuta. Tajemnica zwyciezonych (The Secret of the Defeated). London: Polska
Fundacja Kulturalna, 1992.
Mostwin, Danuta. The Transplanted Family. New York: Arno Press, 1980.
Mostwin, Danuta. Trzecia wartosc. Wykorzenienie i tozsamosc. (The Third Value. Uprooting and
Identity). Lublin: Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski, 1995.
Mostwin, Danuta. Sysze jak spiewa Ameryka (I Can Hear America Singing). London: Polska
Fundacja Kulturalna, 1998.
Mostwin, Danuta. In Search of Ethnic Identity. Social Casework 5 (1972): 307316.
Mostwin, Danuta. The Unknown Polish Immigrant. Migration World 2 (1989): 2430.
Nowakowska, Ewa. Danuta Mostwin. Z perspektywy Brodwayu (Danuta Mostwin.
from a Broadway Perspective). Pisarze emigracyjni. Sylwetki (Emigre Writers. Profiles). Ed.
Bolesaw Klimaszewski and Wojciech Ligeza. Cracow: Uniwersytet Jagiellonski, 1993.
11323.
Pilch, Andrzej, ed. Emigracja z ziem polskich w czasach nowozytnych i najnowszych XVIII-XX w.
(Emigration from Poland in Modern Times). Warsaw: Panstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1984.
Sawinska, Irena. Fascynujaca to przygoda (Fascinating Adventure it Is). Akcent 4 (1993):
3234.
Wyka, Marta. Kultura polska po Jacie (Polish Culture after Yalta). 2 vols. Warsaw: Niezalezna
Oficyna Wydawnicza, 1991.
Wyka, Kazimierz. Pokolenia literackie (Literary Generations). Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1977.
Zubrzycki, Jerzy. Whither Emigracja? The Future of the Polish Community in Great Britain. The Polish Review 4 (1993): 391406.
204
Irodalmi jsg in Exile: 19571989

John Neubauer
1. History
The original Irodalmi jsg (Literary Gazette = I) was founded in 1953, as the
official publication of the Party-led Hungarian Writers Association. However,
in the following years, it gradually assumed a critical attitude, and in 1956 it became a major organ of the critics of Hungarian Stalinism (see Fldes). The
growing criticism prepared the revolution of October 23, 1956, whose highpoint in print then became Is legendary November 2, 1956 issue. The issue,
which contained, among others, Gyula Illyss poem Egy mondat a zsarnoksgrl (A Word about Tyranny), was reprinted in the October 1976 issue of
the I abroad, and integrally translated and published also in French and Italian. In Hungary, the I was closed down by the Kdr regime that came to
power after the revolution, and was replaced as of March 15, 1957 by the new
journal let s Irodalom, edited by Gyrgy Blni, a former exile. On the same
day, the anniversary of the outbreak of the 1848 revolution, the I reappeared,
however, in Vienna, and the issues starting with the next one of May 15, were
published in London. The May issue carried the poem Qui tacent clamant
by the Polish reform-communist poet Adam Wazyk, addressed to the Hungarian writer Tibor Dry, who sat in jail since the suppression of the revolt:
I was with you on the day at the Bem statue / you were jubilant under Hungarian and
Polish flags. / I do not know which of you is still alive and which dead already, / when
everything becomes silent only the fire rattles (ropog)
In the great tumult, Dry, you looked for me / worried, on the phone, did anything
happen to me? / And I heard still your voice at the parliament / Like a last cry lost in
ether.
We, conscience of history / are silent state reason is this silent speech / Where
bitter smoke spreads on the ashes of those who rose / the final myth collapsed. But
Bems memory is alive.
Arthur Koestler, who identified himself as a British citizen of Hungarian

birth, who writes in English but still smiles in his sleep in Hungarian, sent the
Irodalmi jsg in Exile: 19571989 (John Neubauer)
205
message: the mission of migr writers is to build bridges. Much success to

the builders (9).
There were, however, major obstacles in resuscitating the I abroad, of
which financing looked for a while the least difficult one. Many Hungarianlanguage journals and papers existed already all over the world, each catering
to a specific audience. The Hungarian migr community was deeply divided
politically and along generational lines. Leaving aside the nineteenth- and
early-twentieth century immigrants, three earlier generations had settled in
Europe and North America: 1) the exiles that fled Hitler, mostly Jewish; 2) the
exiles that fled from Hungary in 194445 with the Nazis, mostly conservatives and right-wing Nazi sympathizers, and 3) democrats of various sorts
who fled in 194748 to escape the communist takeover (see Borbndi, letrajz vol. 1).
The leading conservative papers, the Hungria (Munich; 194856) and the
Hdverok (194862), adopted strong anti-communist and often anti-Semitic
positions. Apart from a few loners like Sndor Mrai, most of the 194748
Hungarian exiles were politicians, intellectuals, and writers of populist (npies)
persuasion, who belonged to, or sympathized with, the Peasant Party or the
Small Holders Party. Gyula Borbndi, Jzsef Molnr, Imre Vmos, and Sndor Borsos, four young followers of Imre Kovcs, a leader of the Peasant
Party, launched in November 1950 in Zurich the monthly Lthatr. Next
year, the journal moved to Munich, where several of its editors started their
work for the newly established Radio Free Europe. Lthatr became subsequently the leading Hungarian exile journal, with a literary, cultural, and political focus. Its editors maintained a populist outlook, but adopted a broadly
democratic political platform, disregarding party politics and insisting on
quality. With this outlook they gained the confidence not only of Zoltn
Szab and Lszl Cs. Szab but also of the doyen political scientist Oszkr
Jszi, who had retired by then at Oberlin College in Ohio (Borbndi, j Lthatr 3435), as well as of the exiled writers Sndor Mrai, Lajos Zilahy,
Miksa Fenyo, a former stalwart of Nyugat, and of several other non-populist
writers. Jszi even expressed now a political confidence in populism (Borbndi, j Lthatr 80), and the journal, which treasured its association with
him, presented a special issue for his eightieth birthday in February 1955. Lthatrs national agenda had little interest in renewing or developing Jszis
ideas on a Danubian Federation, but it sufficiently appealed to Jszis two earlier associates, both of whom became leading intellectuals on the international scene: the brothers Karl and Michael Polnyi. Karl, an economist,
published in Lthatr (1960) as well as in the I (May 1, 1959) his recollections about Budapests radical Galileo Circle of students (191719), of which
206
he was the President. Michael, author of Personal Knowledge (1958), published

two articles in Lthatr (1954 and 1959), but he did not write the article he
promised to the journal on Zilahy and populism (Borbndi, ltnk 170). It
was the I that subsequently published longer articles by him in 1961 and
1965. We may also include in this group of non-literary prominence the
world-famous classical scholar and mythologist Karl Kernyi, who also published in both journals.
Hungarian populism, which was strongest in the interwar years, represented a broad political spectrum that ranged from right-wing nationalism and
anti-Semitism to left-wing socialism and openness to others sometimes with
confusing inconsistency. Dezso Szab, Lszl Nmeth, Gza Fja, Zsigmond
Mricz, and Jzsef Erdlyi and others were strange political and social bedfellows, and the conflicts were evident even within most individuals. There
were few Jewish populists, though Jszi and some of his earlier associates
came to maintain, as we saw, good relations with the journal. Be it as it may, the
journals populist-nationalist (even if ecumenical) orientation was probably
the reason why, even with Jszis help, Lthatr was unable to get financial
support from the Congress for Cultural Freedom (Borbndi, Lthatr 40), a
CIA-financed funding agency, whose true background came to light only later.
Arthur Koestler, a leader of CCF, may have played a crucial role here.
Lthatrs standing and reputation did suffer as a result of mistakes made
by some of its editors who worked for Radio Free Europe during the 1956
Rrvolution. The radio was accused of creating a false hope among the revolutionaries that a Western intervention would be forthcoming, but its main
mistake was probably that it distrusted Imre Nagy and his reform-communist
advisors. After a review of the broadcasted programs, Bla Horvth, Jzsef
Molnr, and Imre Vmos, all of them editors of Lthatr, were dismissed
from the staff of Radio Free Europe on March 18, 1957. This incident may
have contributed to the CCFs decision to support other Hungarian cultural
institutions. Pl Ignotus, who had escaped from Hungary in 1956, wrote on
February 7, 1957 to Vmos, who was then still Editor-in-Chief at Lthatr:
The people who are behind the journals Monat, Preuve, Encounter (the money comes from
the US, but not from the government) had two ideas: we should convene in Paris or London a congress of Hungarian writers, to substitute for and to speak in the interest of the
muzzled Writers Association at home, and to discuss in general what we can do. Their
second thought was to launch a Hungarian journal comparable to the Polish Kultura.
They asked Gyrgy Plczi-Horvth and myself to organize these two things. (Nagy 9)
Ignotus added that he proposed strengthening and expanding Lthatr, but

the potential financial backers (the CCF ) refused to fund an existing journal.
He discussed then with Zoltn Szab how the new journal could cooperate
207
with Lthatr, and they concluded that the latter should give more attention
to politics and the social sciences, whereas the new journal to literature and
the arts (Nagy 9). Vmos answered on February 12 that he was skeptical
about launching a new journal, for the Hungarian migr community could
barely support the existing one. Lthatr had just become self-sufficient, but
only by not paying the editors and honoraria. Vmos was unwilling to give up
Lthatr, and suggested to start a new biweekly (Nagy 10).
On March 1517, 1957, the exiled Hungarian writers met in London to establish the Magyar rk Szvetsge Klfldn (Association of the Hungarian
Writers Abroad). Ignotus, who was in Hungary a member of the Associations Presidium, was elected President, and Gyrgy Plczi-Horvth as
Secretary (Borbndi claims that the Presidency was first offered to Lajos Zilahy; letrajz 1: 519). The Board of the Association also included Lszl Cs.
Szab, Gyrgy Faludy, Bla Horvth, Imre Kovcs, and Zoltn Szab. The
meeting also decided to launch the I as its publication, and designated
Faludy as its editor, authorizing him to appoint an Editorial Board. The Association announced that it will regard the Lthatr also as its own organ
(I, May 15, 1957: 9). According to the Minutes, Ignotus, declared that the
Writers Association planned to use the funds 1) to expand Lthatr and
publish it more frequently, 2) to start a new weekly in the form and the spirit
of the Irodalmi jsg.
Who was actually behind the CCF? The revelation that it was backed by the
CIA became a great cultural scandal in the 1960s (see Saunders, who does not
mention, however, the Hungarian involvement). The Hungarian writers
somewhat naively accepted what they were told. As Plczi-Horvth reported, Ignotus and himself, found the CCF, which took the initiative and offered money, innocent. Its leaders claimed they served only cultural goals
and were willing to put down in writing that they had no intention to exert any
political or other pressure on the editors. The guidance of the journal would
be entrusted to the leaders of the Writers Association. As to the identity of
CCF, the two mediators concluded from publications and newspaper clippings that it supported scholarly and artistic movements, and provided scholarships: We found nowhere any momentum that would be suspicious. The
Ford Foundation is behind them. Should this become known, the Kdr
people would say we work for American money. This is why they established a
mediating body [the Hungarian Literary Gazette Ltd.] that oversees the Hungarian moneys (Nagy 12). Faludy reports, however, in the second part of his
memoirs that CCFs Josselson repeatedly attempted to sway the political
orientation of the I: he suggested, for instance, that the journal take a Titoist
line (Faludy, Pokolbli 189), he repeatedly wanted to see some US-friendly ar-
208
ticles (229), and he was even willing to raise Faludys salary if he followed suit
(192). Faludy claims that he never gave in.
The London resolutions immediately ran into trouble. The CCF reiterated
that its mission permitted only support for new initiatives (Borbndi, ltnk
158); still worse, an in-fighting at Lthatr split the editors the following year,
and the dissident editors launched in October a new journal, j Lthatr. The
old one, under the editorship of Vmos and Bla Horvth, gradually lost
ground, repatriated to Budapest with the editors in 1962, and ceased publication a decade later (Nagy 31; Borbndi, ltnk 12972; see also Ignotuss
letters of May 16 and August 14 1958, in Borbndi, ltnk 136, 139).
As to the Irodalmi jsg, Faludy formed an Editorial Board consisting of
Tams Aczl, Gyrgy Plczi-Horvth, Zoltn Szab, Mikls Krass, and
Sndor Andrs (Nagy 16), and the May 15, 1957 issue presented itself as the
official journal of the Writers Association. The imprint listed Faludy as Managing Editor, but its Editorial Board differed from the above-mentioned list,
and also from the list given by Borbndi (letrajz 1: 467): it listed Tams
Aczl, Lszl Cs. Szab, Endre Enczi, Imre Kovcs, Gyrgy Plczi-Horvth
(editor), Zoltn Szab, and Imre Vmos. The postal address of the editorial
offices was given as 25 Haymarket, London.
Soon, however, power struggles started to darken the horizon of the new
journal. Zoltn Szab complained that a telegram to Franco, requested by the
CCF (I May 15, 1957), was not authorized by the signatories, whereas an
angry Ferenc Fejto alleged that Faludy wanted to censor his article
(Nagy 1718, 35). Faludy did ask, indeed, for more power, mentioning as a
sign of his success that the I had 2750 subscribers by November 14, 1957.
Everybody admired Faludys poetic talent, but more and more writers expressed doubts about his organizing capability and political acumen, and requests came to de-centralize rather centralize power. Fejto, Tibor Mray,
Lszl Gara, and Endre Kartson wished to see greater variety in the journal,
and they pleaded for delegating more power to the Parisian editors and contributors. In their eyes, the I was too much of a London journal (Nagy 21,
2327). Two Board members were removed without consultation with the
editorial staff, and the Association did not intervene. A group that included
Andrs, Gmri, Kartson, and Mrton submitted seven demands, threatening to sever their ties with the journal. Cs. Szab urged Faludy to list the editors ( June 2, 1958), whereas Ignotus, as President of the WritersAssociation,
suggested in August 1958 that the I should be regarded as an organ of the
Association, should devote more space to culture, should not bring any politically divisive material on the front page, and divide the responsibilities among
the paid editors (Nagy 4345; see also 4651)
209
Problems at the I were aggravated by conflicts at the Writers Association, which had 126 members by the time its Congress gathered on October 2326, 1958 in Paris. The Congress decided to add Endre Enczi as Secretary to the London office, and to launch, with money advanced by the CCF,
a publication series called Knyves Ch. The series became quite successful, and
published, among other books, a selection of Istvn Bibs essays in 1960 and
Tibor Mrays Bcsulevl in 1965.
Due to internal squabbles, Zoltn Szab resigned in the summer of 1960,
both as editor of the book series and as Secretary-General of the Association
(Borbndi, letrajz 1: 46566). Faludy claims in his memoirs that Szab used
every means at his disposal, from articles to letters and calumny, to turn the
readers and the American sponsors against him (Pokolbli 219). The editors of
j Lthatr sided with Szab, blamed Ignotus for the difficulties, and exited
from the Association towards the end of 1960 (Borbndi, ltnk 185). To
make things worse, the CCF stopped supporting the Association on March 10,
1961 (Nagy 107). A substantial reduction in the subsidy of the I early 1960
forced the editors to lower the salaries and honoraria (Borbndi, letrajz 519).
The subsidy stopped completely in 1961 (Nagy 135).
The Writers Association quietly passed away, but the I survived, if
bruised. After some preliminary discussions about merging with other
papers, for instance the Viennese Magyar Hirad (Nagy 108109), a mysterious supporter suddenly emerged and saved the journal (Nagy 112, 115),
which then moved to Paris in February 1962, for administrative as well as financial reasons. Tibor Mray became and remained its efficient and self-sacrificing Managing Editor until 1989; Endre Enczi worked with Mray until his
death in 1974.
The move alleviated but did not solve the financial misery. Towards the end
of the decade, inflation wreaked havoc (with the I as well as the j Lthatr
= L). Mray was forced to announce in December 1969 a rise in subscription rate and a conversion to a monthly format. A call for additional support
had some success, but Mray had to announce on December 15, 1971 a
further reduction to six issues of sixteen pages per year. In 1972, a foundation
was established for the journal in Switzerland. In 1973 (see the May/July
issue), the journal shifted to a Canadian printer, which made twenty-page issues possible (1975.810: 3). An eloquent call for support stressed that the I
was the only Budapest-born paper abroad, but exaggerated the unity of Hungarian literature:
it unifies the Hungarian writers, poets, scholars, critics who live abroad, and all those
who believe in literary and political freedom and are the opponents of dictatorships on
the left and the right [] Hungarian literature is one and indivisible (1969.2021: 1)
210
2. Contributors
Vmos rightly worried that the pool of talented migr writers and the
number of potential readers abroad were small. Writers at home could not
(dared not) publish in the migr papers until well into the 1970s, while
writers abroad were on short supply and were in need of other jobs to earn a
living. As a result, the I had to share most of its core authors with L. Still,
we can mention here only the most important ones.
Some of the Is older authors had already fled in the 1930s, but most of
them had left Hungary 1947 or later. Of course, no Nazi or right-wing writer
who left in 194445 was invited (or wanted) to publish in the I. From the
later 1970s onward, the journal published contributions from authors living
in Hungary (for instance Gyrgy Konrd), first anonymously, later under
their own name. A good many authors were migrs rather than exiles in the
strict sense, though until the 1980s they too had difficulty reentering Hungary
as contributor to the I.
The refugees of 1956, by far the largest group of contributors, included a
number of the poets. Gza Thinsz lived in Sweden, and published, next to
poems, translations and anthologies; Lszl Kemenes-Gfin taught English
and American literature in Canada, and served 198188 as co-editor of the
Hungarian literary magazine Arknum. Vince Sulyok worked at the Oslo University library in various capacities. gota Kristof published a number of
poems in the I, but stopped contributing as of 1965 because she turned to
fiction writing in French. Andrs Sndor taught at various US universities and
retired as Professor of German from Howard University in Washington D.C.
Gyrgy Gmri also taught at various universities before he settled at Cambridge University as a teacher of Polish language and literature. He contributed to the I not only his own poems, but also articles on and translations from Polish texts. Lrnt Czigny, a literary historian who taught
Hungarian, among others, at Berkeley, worked more extensively for L, but
also published articles in the I. Gyozo Hatr, who settled in London, contributed some poems to the journal, but most of his prodigious output consisted of fiction, reviews, and essay. He had demonstrated his talent as translator already back in Hungary with a Hungarian version of Laurence Sternes
Tristram Shandy.
Tibor Mray, Is editor, had started his career with reports on the Korean
war from a North-Korean perspective. Both he and Tams Aczl had received
Stalin prizes, but after Stalins death they came to support Imre Nagy and
served as his associates in the 1956 revolution. Together they wrote The Revolt
of the Mind (1959), an excellent account of the intellectual ferment that led to it.
211
Another reform-communist, Gyula Hy (see the introductory essay of this

volume), was also deeply engaged in the revolution and jailed until 1960 after
its suppression. The I campained for his release, and he joined as a contributor after he left the country in 1964. Among the refugees of 1956, Pl Ignotus,
Gyrgy Plczi-Horvth, and Gyrgy Faludy had already lived in the West
during the war, returned to Hungary in 194748, and were arrested there.
Endre Kartson settled in Paris, taught at the University of Lille, and wrote
for several of the leading Hungarian publications. The Magyar Muhely published his first collection of novellas. The frequent contributors of the 1956
group included Gyula Sipos, who settled in Paris and published some of Is
most sophisticated cultural and literary criticism under the name Pl Albert;
Pter Halsz, who settled in New York, the scene of many of his I contributions as well as of his novel Msodik Avenue (Second Avenue); and Tams Tuz,
a priest who settled in Canada, and regularly contributed poems, and sometimes short stories, to the I. Gyrgy Ferdinandy, Tams Kabdeb, and Mtys Srkzi were important contributors to both the L and the I. Ferdinandy received his doctorate in 1969 at the University of Strassbourg, and
wrote until 1962 only in French. From 1964 until his retirement, he taught at
the University of Puerto Rico. Tams Kabdeb, like several other contributors, earned his living as a librarian, while writing for several exile publications, including the L, the I. He translated and wrote also for English
language publications. Srkzi, who also wrote under the pseudonym Mrton
Fekete, has been an extremely prolific writer, journalist, and graphic artist,
who ran in the years 197194 a gallery called Fehr Holl in London. For
the I (as well as for the L) he wrote articles, reports, and stories.
Among the authors who left Hungary earlier, we find the poet and scholar
Sndor [ron] Kibdi-Varga, who lived in the Netherlands and was a founder
of the Mikes Kelemen Kr (see his article below). Like Lszl Cs. Szab and
Zoltn Szab (both of whom broke with the communist regime in the years
194749), he was closer to the L. In contrast, the great satirist Gyrgy
Mikes published only in the I. He had left Hungary before the war, settled in
London, and achieved enormous popularity with his satires, especially with
How to be an Alien (1946). He also worked for the BBC and, later for Radio
Free Europe, frequently contributing also for such prestigious English-language publications as the Observer, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Encounter.
The I had a number of regular contributors on non-literary subjects. On
political matters, the two most distinguished contributors were Ferenc Fejto
and Anna Kthly, both of whom stopped writing for the L after 195859.
Fejto (see our introductory essay) had been living in France since 1939 and
212
became an internationally respected journalist and political analyst working

for the AFP and writing for various foreign journals. Kthly, a leader of the
social-democratic party, had been in jail for opposing the disastrous merger of
the Socialist and Communist parties. After 1956, she settled in Brussels and
became Editor-in-Chief of the London Hungarian paper Npszava. Tibor
Hank, the key philosophic voice of both the I and the L, was primarily a
scholar of Marxism and Gyrgy Lukcs. Jnos Gergely, a linguist as well as
musicologist, who had been living in France since 1938, contributed several
articles on music. Magda Czigny and others reported on exhibitions and the
art scene, while Pter Gosztonyi regularly reported (also in the L) about his
archival research on Hungarys twentieth-century history.
Our list of contributors ought to be complemented with one that enumerates those who did not publish in the I. We shall name here only a few. The
journal would not accept, of course, contributions from former Nazis and extreme right-wing writers; neither did the L, though Borbndi thought in
retrospect that his journal should have made greater efforts to win Jzsef
Nyro and Albert Wass as contributors (ltnk 76). Both journals excluded
also left-wing writers that continued to support Stalinism, though I had
some interest in engaging Western communists in a dialogue.
Conspicuously absent from Is list of authors until 1978 was Sndor
Mrai, perhaps the most distinguished Hungarian exile writer. Though he
needed income, he jealously guarded his independence and kept out of the
exile squabbles by writing books instead. Radio Free Europe engaged him to
write a column for several years, but only as an external contributor. His only
contribution to Lthatr was his important Halotti Beszd (Funeral Sermon; 1951), which the journal reprinted in 1954, together with a critical Hungarian radio broadcast on it by ron Tamsi. Out of respect, Mrai acknowledged in his reply that his poem reflected the excessive pessimism of the years
around 1950 (Borbndi, ltnk 8183). The I made some initial efforts to
gain Mrai as a contributor, but, Ignotus claims in a letter to Fenyo in 1958,
the writer conceitedly rejected every effort at cooperation, even the publication of his books (Nagy 31). For two decades, the I could only bring reviews of Mrais works, but, in 1978, the ice broke: the journals May/June
issue printed poems from a volume that he was about to publish, and the following two issues brought Mrais longer essay on the great Hungarian modernist Gyula Krdy.
Finally, we should mention some authors that contributed to the I but not
to the L. In the case of gota Kristof this may have been accidental. In the
case of Tams Aczl, Ferenc Fejto (after 1959), Arthur Koestler (after 1959),
Gyrgy Mikes, Anna Kthly (after 1958), Lszl Gara (one article in UL), and
213
some others, political and personal differences may have played a role. For the
similar reasons, the L also had contributors that did not publish with the
competitor. Gyula Gombos, who had his differences with the I on account
of his book on Dezso Szab (see below), did finally contribute to it a review in
1979; Mikls and Andrs Domahidy stayed with the L.
3. Orientation: Politics and Readership

How resolutely the I should combat Communism was and remained a contentious issue. Everybody rejected, of course, the Stalinist regimes as well as
the one established by Jnos Kdr after 1956. But what to do with writers like
Tibor Dry and Lszl Nmeth who gradually accepted a modus vivendi with
the Kdr regime? As Ignotus wrote to Vmos (see above) the CCF envisioned a journal like the Polish Kultura, which did, indeed, become, a bridge
between Polish culture abroad and at home. In the years immediately after the
1956 revolution, neither individual Hungarian exiles nor exile organizations
would function as mediators: the political and cultural break was absolute. All
that the I could do (and did very effectively) was to mobilize world opinion
in defense of the Hungarian writers in jail or facing execution.
However, the writers around I were by no means unanimous in their relation to Communism. Faludy, who barely survived long years in Hungarian
jails and camps, took a strong anti-communist line, claiming that the reform
communists had completely abandoned their former ideology. As Ferenc
Fejto complained to Ignotus on May 15, 1958, Faludy believed that Imre
Nagy and his associates, as well as the communist writers of the (Hungarian)
I, considered themselves in the end as communists only for tactical reasons:
by then they had already been converted to liberal capitalism, the true redeemer (Nagy 35). Fejto and the reform communists involved with the old
and the new Irodalmi jsg strongly disagreed with this approach, and feared
that a doctrinaire anti-communist stance would bring the journal into the
orbit of the Hungarian Nazis and the admireres of the Horthy regime. Ignotus
shared Fejtos view that some articles of the I were leaning towards a dated,
simplistic, and dangerous anti-Bolshevism (Nagy 19). According to the notes
of the Associations October 11, 1957 meeting in London, he remarked that
ex-communists, and those who were theoretically still communist believers,
played an important role in the 1956 revolution: We can successfully fight
against communism only if we are no anti-communists (Nagy 22). Andrs
Sndor, together with Gmri, Kartson, Krass, Lszl Mrton, and others
submitted a Memorandum to Ignotus, charging that the I adopted a sim-
214
plistic anti-communist position that dealt only with the excesses of the former
Stalinists. They wanted to see Istvn Bibs papers printed, and this actually
happened in a Supplement to the November 15, 1957 issue.
(Anti-)Communism remained on the agenda of I, but three other explosive issues were conspicuously absent from it: populist anti-Semitism and
nationalism, the Holocaust, and Hungarys relation to its neighbors. Of the
three subjects, Populism was the most difficult to avoid, since the editors of
Is counterpart, the L, adhered to it, though not in a narrow and dogmatic
way. The debate usually concerned issues of the past rather than the present.
Take, for instance, the two-part critical article on Populism in the L that Ignotus contributed in 1959. The journal followed this up in the summer of that
year by interviewing Lajos Zilahy, a prominent older Hungarian writer living
in New York, who was himself not a populist. Zilahi disagreed with Ignotus,
who suggested that the movement had some fascist overtones. The meager
reaction disappointed the editors, and Borbndi thought in retrospect that
people had been reluctant to speak up on this touchy and divisive subject (ltnk 169). Michael Polnyi outlined his planned but never written response to
Zilahy in a letter to Borbndi: Zilahy should have acknowledged that some
populist writers made right-wing statements in the interwar years, but, Polnyi
thought, such remarks were common in those turbulent years of ideological
confrontation (ltnk 170).
Nevertheless, the flammable issue of Populism ignited when Gyula Gombos, a key figure at L, published at the journals press his extensive study of
Dezso Szab, one of the most important but also most controversial populist
figures of the interwar years. As it was evident already from excerpts that the
L had published earlier, Gombos admired Szab, holding his rejection of
both Nazism and Communism as a possible point of departure for a Hungarian third road beyond these oppressive ideologies though he admitted
that Szabs experiments did not find the right road. The editors sang high
praise of the book but were for a long time unable to find a reviewer for it, and
they could not get a subsidy for it from the Radio Free Europe Fund in New
York, because the Fund received several protests against its support. Finally,
Lrnt Czigny wrote in 1968 a highly critical review of the book in L, titled
Szab Dezso is Dead, which forced the embarrassed editors to come to
Gomboss rescue in the January 1969 issue, with a counter attack aimed at Ignotus and some members of the Parisian Magyar Muhely (Borbndi, ltnk
25960, 280, 299300, 304306).
Dezso Szab, and Gomboss book on him, divided the contributors of L:
Cs. Szab, Czigny, and others that also wrote for the I sided with Szabs
critics. Within the I, the opinions diverged considerably less. The veteran
215
Miksa Fenyo noted Szabs relentless anti-Semitism; reviewing his autobiographical leteim (freshly published in Budapest) and Gomboss study (which
he greatly respected for its effort at objectivity), he worried about an imminent Szab revival inside and outside Hungary (1966.19: 89). The linguist
dm Makkai accepted Fenyos criticism, but only as an objection coming
from the older generation (1967.2: 6). Ignotus got back into the argument two
years later, when Jzsef Molnr attacked him and others in the L. Ignotus
wondered why Szab and Gombos were now allowed in communist Hungary,
and hoped that Szabs (and Gyula Szekfus) Hungary was not the only alternative to Communism (1969.11: 3). Most of Is contributors probably
agreed with dm Kosztolnyi, son of the famous Modernist writer Dezso
Kosztolnyi, who summed up his view of Dezso Szab some ten years later:
One can learn from him, but not follow him (1978.1112: 10).
The debate on Populism continued in the 1970s. Borbndi wrote a negative
review in the L ( June 1973) of Ignotuss book Hungary (1972): he disagreed
with Ignotuss account of the interwar years, and claimed that Ignotus forgot
that the Jewish middle- and upper-class were pillars of the Horthys regime.
Ignotus responded in the August/December 1973 issue of the I (5) that
his view of Szab, Nmeth, Fja, and other populists was not exclusively
negative. His response, with the characteristic title We have to Confess the
Past, took issue, furthermore, with Borbndi and all those who thought he
should have devoted less time to the Jewish Question. This was, in his eyes,
precisely the problem of Borbndis book on Hungarian Populism: the book
filled a lacuna but was itself full of such lacunae by ignoring Zilahys call to
support the fascist Prime Minister Gyula Gmbs and the problematic
politics of Lszl Nmeth (1976.1112: 10). Next spring, Gyrgy Schpflin
defended Borbndi in the I (1977.34: 10) by arguing that Populism was the
most important trend in the interwar period but this was hardly a defense of
its politics.
The only important L article that broached the history of Hungarian
Jews was published by Vilmos Juhsz in the 1965/2 issue. Juhsz claimed that
the Hungarian writers were silent when they should have combated the Nazi
and quasi-Nazi ideologies, but, he went on, due to their older and more recent
persecutions, many Jews had believed that they alone were victim, everybody
else belonged to the persecutors. Hungary, their host country, had also suffered much throughout the centuries, and, so Juhsz thought, the Hungarian
peasants were more exploited by the leading classes than the Jews (Borbndi,
ltnk 24142). Curiously, but characteristically, the only significant reaction
to Juhszs article by Imre Kovcs, key figure at the L contested merely
the alleged guilt of the Hungarian writers, not Juhszs remarks on the rela-
216
tivity of Jewish suffering (Borbndi, ltnk 242). Within a broad and deep
discussion of the Holocaust, such remarks and claims would have been surely
appropriate, but in a general silence on the topic they sound inappropriate. It
is as if the main issue of the Holocaust was the innocence of the Hungarian
writers!
In these and other debates, the immediate topic was always the position
that populist writers assumed in the interwar years. How supportive were they
of the right wing and the Nazis? How anti-Semitic were they? Did they support the anti-Jewish laws of 1939 and 1940? Those who answered these questions in the negative, those who denied the anti-Semitism of a Dezso Szab, a
Gza Fja, or a Lszl Nmeth held, one suspects, restricted notions of folk
and nation. The populists in and around the L were generally not anti-Semites (Borbndi visited Israel several times to foster the journals ties, and many
contributors to the journal had a Jewish background), and the L kept its distance from them except for the great anti-Semite of the post-1989 decades
at home, Istvn Csurka, with whom the journal developed a close relationship
in the last years of its existence. However, the L was unwilling to or incapable of genuinely reworking the past: on the atrocities committed by Hungarian soldiers, on the Holocaust, and on Hungarian anti-Semitism it maintained a silence that curiously coincided with the position of the regime at
home. Fenyo did review in the I Tibor Cseress novel Hideg napok on the infamous Novi Sad/jvidk massacre of Serbs and Jews in 1942 (1965.8: 7), the
L ignored it, although it did review other works by Cseres. Imre Kertszs
name is not in the index, although his novel Sorstalansg (1975) was later good
for a Novel-prize. Again, the silence accords with the books sad neglect in
Hungary for quite a while. Is record in remembering the Holocaust and
performing some kind of Trauerarbeit (work of mourning) is not much better.
Pter Vrdys article on Raoul Wallenberg and the tragedy of the Hungarian
Jews, the most comprehensive and trenchant (non-literary) treatment of the
problem in the I, appeared rather late (1985.1: 1115).
4. Contacts with Literary Life in Hungary

Exile publications had three ways to build bridges towards literature in Hungary: 1) by reporting about, reviewing, or even publishing, literature written at
home, 2) by publishing literary and cultural materials unavailable in Hungary,
and, 3) by trying to get the publications themselves into the hands of readers
in Hungary. From the late 1960s onward, occasional personal contacts also
occurred, but these were monitored and often forbidden by the Hungarian
217
officials for many more years. In contrast to the major sister journals, the
Polish Kultura and the Czech Svedectv, the I addressed itself to the exile community rather than to readers back home.
The I was severely criticized in its early years for not devoting sufficient
attention to the writers and their publications at home. Comparing the Polish
Kultura with the Hungarian exile journals, Gmri noted, for instance, that
the I had failed to follow the literary scene at home, and, apart from a few issues, this was equally true of the L (Nagy 7274). Indeed, the I noted with
envy in its only extensive review of Kultura, that its readers were not restricted
to those abroad, for the journal reached Poland and was able to influence domestic thinking and even shape public opinion there (1959.23: 4).
Indeed, the I was for a number of years more concerned with the political
situation of writers in Hungary than with the actual literary production. In the
immediate post-1956 years, the journals primary concern in this respect was
to help writers at home. It frequently manifested its solidarity with writers
who stayed in Hungary, but this extended, certainly in the first years, only to
those that did not support the regime openly. Lszl Nmeths reputation, for
instance, suffered, when he journeyed in the Soviet Union in 1959 and gave
high praise to what he saw. Of course, the I rejected with sarcasm Jzsef
Darvass Kormos g (Sooty Sky; 1959), a system-friendly portrayal of the
counter-revolution of 1956 (1959.10: 4). In contrast, Gyozo Hatrs review
An Ounce of a Masterwork (1960.4: 8) enthusiastically greeted Iskola a hatron (School on the Frontier; 1959), the magnum opus of the formerly silenced writer Gza Ottlik.
By the early 1960s, it became evident that writers in Hungary would have to
make some compromises in order to survive. The Hungarian Writers Association was reconstituted in 1959 after a two-year hiatus; the writers in exile
understood that joining it may be a matter of survival, though they regarded
active participation with great suspicion. In literary as well as other matters,
the regime at home adopted Jnos Kdrs famous slogan, whoever is not
against us is with us. Ironically, the slogan was coined by Tibor Mray in the
I to illustrate the difference between the Kdr and the Rkosi regimes
(1961.20: 7)
Of course, the I itself remained on the regimes against us list for a long
time still. Since the Kdr regime regarded exile publications as enemy material almost to the very end of its existence, it was difficult to get exile journals to Hungary. As the number of travelers from and to Hungary increased,
more issues could be smuggled in, but as late as 1979 the Hungarian Postal
Service would intermittently return issues of the I mailed to Hungarian addresses with the grotesque explanation that a Lausanne international postal
218
agreement forbade the posting of pornographic and explosive materials (Borbndi, ltnk 288, 414, 434). Nevertheless, a number of issues did reach Hungary and were circulated there. Some information on the I became common
knowledge via attacks on it in the Hungarian media (1969.56: 15). As of
1982, Hungarians could subscribe to the Magyar Muhely, the least political of
the Hungarian exile journals.
While Kultura could publish writers at home already in the 1960s (first
under pseudonyms, later under the writers own name), the I started doing
this only in the late 1970s. The November/December 1977 issue brought
both Gyrgy Konrds A fggetlensg lass munkja (The Slow Work of
Independence; 1011) and Imre Jankovichs Meggyozo kisrlet s ktes
kritika (Convincing Experiment and Doubtful Criticism; 1213). Both authors offered their articles to the I knowing that they were unpublishable
in Hungary and that publication abroad will get them into trouble at home.
Konrd was, of course, not unknown to the journals readers: his first novel, A
ltogat (The Visitor; 1969), had been greeted in the July 15, 1969 issue by Albert Pl with the title A Writer was Born. In 1973, Konrds and Ivn Szelnyis manuscript Az rtelmisg tja az osztlyhatalomhoz (The Intellectuals Road to Class Power) was rejected by the Hungarian publishers and
confiscated. Konrd lost his job and faced court proceedings, but the text did
circulate in a samizdat edition. As the I reported, Konrd and Szelnyi were
offered permissons to leave the country (1975.57: 16). Szelnyi left; Konrd
went abroad for visits but always returned, and now that he had little to lose,
he ventured to publish in the I. Others followed in the 1980s, but the
numbers remained relatively small.
Turning to the larger picture, authors in Hungary, especially the younger
ones, received spotty attention in the I. Gyula Illys, the doyen, was, of
course, frequently discussed and praised, but the other leading populist,
Lszl Nmeth, elicited critical reviews in 1962 and 1963, on account of his
political stance, both in the prewar and the post-1956 period. Of the populists, the courageous dissident Istvn Bib had received most attention. The
classic avant-guard writer, Lajos Kassk, and Hungarys leading female
novelist, Magda Szab, were also featured frequently, though not without
criticism. The I was in the forefront in fighting for the release of Tibor Dry
from jail, but he all but disappeared from its pages until his death in 1977,
probably because he was no longer a dissident.
The lacunae were most serious with respect to the younger and the youngest Hungarian writers. Among the former, Ferenc Karinthy and Istvn rkny were occasionally discussed, but Gza Ottlik, Mikls Mszly, and other
distinguished writers who were in disfavor at home should have received
219
more attention. Is record on the upcoming youngest generation of great

writers was rather spotty: two of Pter Esterhzys works were reviewed, and
Albert Pl considered Pter Ndass Egy Csaldregnye vge Fny a sttsgben (Light in Darkness): one of the most mature works of the new Hungarian literature; it is a ruthless and frank work, but one that plows deep and is
tightly held together with a great literary logic, whose spirit borrows, as it
were, something from the holy scriptures (1981.5: 17). As we noted, Imre
Kertszs Sorstalansg was not reviewed.
5. Modern World Literature

Exile literary journals have a double readership, and both are problematic,
even if we disregard political differences. The home readership of the Irodalmi
jsg was for a long time virtually unavailable, and as trans-border traffic of
persons and publications became easier the journal had to face competition.
As of 1961, Sndor Andrs found it grotesque that Nagyvilg or Kortrs at
home gave a better account of Western artistic and literary currents than the
outdated one in the I (Nagy 70). Even the home need for translations was
partly satisfied by Nagyvilg and other Hungarian journals, though they had to
neglect ideologically disfavored writers and currents. As to the readers
abroad, they could get in principle all information they needed, but their interests were divergent; they were not just literati, but mostly professionals and
intellectuals whose interest in literature was broadly humanistic and political
rather than formal or theoretical. Even some of the contributors, good as they
may have been, tended to dislike radical innovation and avant-garde experimentation. Witness, for instance, Gyozo Hatrs rather critical review of the
London staging of Peter Weisss Marat/Sade (1964.20: 7), or Lrnt Czignys
review of two works from the orbit of the more experimental Magyar Muhely:
a book by Gyrgy Ferdinandy from 1970 (1970.9: 8) and Pl Nagys language
experiments (1972.56: 14). As Borbndi reports, his L regularly received
complaints that the poems published in the journal were incomprehensible
(ltnk 488), though these were by no means avant-garde. My following critical remarks were written with the full realization that no editorial policy could
have satisfied all conflicting needs and demands.
The I, like the L, regularly reported on the Hungarian exiled writers,
and they published and reviewed their work. Since most of the important
writers abroad were already contributors to the journals, they expected to receive favorable reviews, and the editors often had to engage in delicate balancing acts. The animosities around Lrnt Czignys review of Gyula Gom-
220
boss Dezso Szab book show, how difficult it was to publish a genuinely
critical review of a contributor. Another example was the publication of Sndor Andrss Hazatrs (Homecoming) in the Ls last issue of 1967. This
story about a tragic suicide of a Hungarian migr in California won a juried
competition of the journal. Imre Kovcs, however, found that it transgressed
the limits of free speech and should not have been published, at least not in
the L, for it gave a false picture of the US, as well of the young Hungarians
in exile. Most reactions sharply disagreed with Kovcs (Borbndi, ltnk
29597), but the case showed that publishing such decadent Hungarian
writings was a hazardous undertaking. Ironically, Kovcs titled his protest
The New Sufferings of Werther, unaware that this would become the very
title of a short novel by the East-German Ulrich Plenzdorf (1973), and that
Kovcss criticism would be echoed by the communist officials of the GDR!
For readers at home, the rhetorical attack on literary decadence must have
been dj vu.
As to contemporary events and trends in world literature, Irodalmi jsg
tried to cover them in four major ways, 1) by printing (short) translations of
important works, 2) by reporting on the political positions of living foreign
writers, especially inasmuch as they concerned Hungary, 3) via interviews, and
4) via short notices about new publications, performances, or other events.
The I printed during the first year of its existence translations of Albert
Camuss LHte (from LExile et le royaume), Franz Kafkas Der Hungerknstler, James Joyces Evelyne, Wolfgang Borcherts Nachts schlafen die
Ratten doch, John Steinbecks The Lopez Sisters, and Ernest Hemingways
The Killers. The I also printed Le Rengat (1958.8: 910) yet another
story from Camuss LExile et le royaume, and an interview with the author
(1957.13: 3), who was especially welcome on the pages of the journal on account of his sympathy with the Hungarian cause. When he died in a car accident, Ferenc Fejto said farewell to him in a front page article titled Our
Friend, Albert Camus (1960.2: 1).
The Italian prose writers Ignacio Silone and Alberto Moravia (interview
1960.12: 4), the Swiss dramatist Friedrich Drrenmatt (interview 1963.1: 1),
and Salvatore Madariaga were also well-liked, for the prominent role they
played in international protest actions against the suppression of the revolution and the jailing of writers. T.S. Eliot and the German Philosopher Karl
Jaspers joined Camus and Silone to ask for the release of Tibor Dry (1958.3:
3). The I reported with satisfaction that Howard Fast, a prominent American communist, left the Party because of the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolution (1957.5: 6), and it printed a lead article by him on February 15, 1958. However, it also had to report with biting irony that, according
221
to a report in the Budapest paper Npszava, the Brazilian writer Jorge Amado
acknowledged the right of the Hungarian people to defend themselves
against attempts by the US (sic!) to penetrate the country (1957.8: 2).
Translations of two short pieces by Jorge Luis Borges appeared in the I
(1958.3: 9 and 1962.12: 11), but texts by the classic modernists became rare.
What we do find are news items and reports on living authors such as T.S.
Eliot (selections of his Ash Wednesday were published in the L in 1965 in
Hatrs translation), Aragon (report in 1966 that he protested against the Soviet condemnation of Sinavsky & Daniel), Simone de Beauvoir, and the German playwright Rolf Hochhuth, whose play Der Stellvertretende (1963) on the
Popes failure to help saving Jews led to extensive discussions, although, regrettably, not on the pages of the I. Other writers discussed in the I included the Russian poet Ossip Mandelstam, the American dramatist Arthur
Miller, and, last but not least, George Orwell, whose Animal Farm was translated and published in the book series of the I. Of course, the I gave ample
space to the political and sensational affairs of the Russian writers Boris Pasternak, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Iosif Brodsky, Andrey Sinyavsky [Avram
Terz], and Yuli Daniel.
Rather than extending the list, we ask which broader trends and movements the journal neglected or ignored, for only this way can we get a better
picture of its taste and orientation. Some omissions are striking. Of the Beat
Generation in the US only Allen Ginsberg was mentioned (but not Lawrence
Ferlinghetti or Jack Kerouac); the whole Latin-American boom after
Borges was ignored, including two Nobel-prize winners, Miguel ngel Asturias (1967) and Gabriel Garca Mrquez (1982). Equally absent were the US
post-modern writers starting with Thomas Pynchon. The French Noveau
Roman was mentioned in a review of Michel Butors La modification (1958.2: 8)
and a rather cautious essay by Jzsef Bakucz on Natalie Sarrautes essays
(1964.19: 14), but Alain Robbe-Grill, for instance, is conspicuously absebt in
Is index. Some writers we miss may have been named in passing (which
would not lead to inclusion in the final index), but they did not receive the
critical, historical, and analytic attention they deserved. Due to its limitations,
I offered its readers not just a limited but also a one-sided view of contemporary world literature. As we shall see in Section VII, this skewed presentation of living literature corresponded to a virtual silence about the revolutionary changes in literary theory and the humanities in general.
222
6. The East-Central European Literatures

The inability (and often unwillingness) of the Hungarian exile community to
seriously reassess the painful apects of Hungarys literary, political, and intellectual past prevented it also from envisioning a genuine future for the
country within a European community. To be sure, the I had a decidedly international outlook, and it made some efforts to inform its readers about the
latest literary, theatrical, and artistic trends in Europe and the US, even if, as
we have just seen, its accounts were incomplete and usually written with a
conservative artistic taste. The I gave more space to the literature of Hungarys neighbors than the L, but this was still quite inadequate in view of the
tasks ahead. In particular, the Central-Europe discussion that started in the
1970s, involving writers from both sides of the Iron Curtain, did not get adquate attention. To be sure, the I did print Milan Kunderas Tragedy of
Central Europe (1984.3: 12, 23), but none of the responses to it. It is hard
to avoid the conclusion that, as a rule, the I (and the L even more) became
interested in the neighboring literatures only when politics flared up (e.g. Czechoslovakia in 1968, Poland in 1981) or when the suppression of the Hungarian minority became especially brutal, as was the case with Romania under
Causescu in the 1970s and 80s.
The I covered Polish literature far better than any of the other East-Central European ones: of the thirty-two East-Central European writers listed in
the index, twenty-two, more than two-thirds are Polish. This was partly due to
the traditional ties between the two countries, partly to the strength of Polish
literature both at home and in exile, and, last but not least, to Gyrgy Gmri,
a specialist of Polish literature and a frequent contributor to the I. After
printing Adam Wazyks poem of solidarity with the 1956 Revolution (see
above), the I introduced him to Hungarian readers (1958.1: 10). From the
later Nobel-Prize winner Czesaw Miosz the I printed a passage from Kultura, which was dedicated to the memory of Hungarian workers, students, and
soldiers (1957.10: 7). The I also published several years later a translation of
his Ode to October (1964.19: 13), which does not explicitly mention Hungary but concludes with the words: You offer a magic ring / if I turn it, the
invisible precious stone of freedom shines in it. / Oh you, October.
The I printed in its December 1, 1961 issue a translation of Jerzy Andrzejewskis The Great Lament of the Paper Head (1953), one of the first daring
attacks on the slavish servants of dictatorship. Readers of the journal could
also follow Marek Hasko, the Polish enfant terrible, as he wandered to Paris, Israel, and Germany. More important were two articles by Konstanty Jelensky,
the distinguished essayist living in Paris: a lead article on the tradition-respect-
223
ing Polish revisionism of Adam Schaff and others (1962.5: 1), and the other
on Polish Writers and Censorship (1964.20: 3). The I frequently brought
other Polish news as well: on Sawomir Mrozeks Strip Tease ( July 15, 1962), on
Polands legendary theater director Jerzy Grotowski (1966.13: 4), and on Witold Gombrowiczs Kosmos (1967.10: 3). It featured a work by Leszek Porok
(1961.8: 1112), poems by Zbigniew Herbert, and the poetry of Wisawa
Szymborska, the later Nobel-Prize winner. Late 1966 and early 1967 the I
reported extensively on the events in Poland. Leszek Kolakowski and Tadeusz Konwicki were excluded from the Party, Kazimierz Brandys returned
his Party booklet, and Kolakowskis colleagues were unwilling to strip him of
his chair. At the end of the following year, Gmri reported on some of the
other key events in Poland: the scandal about Kazimierz Dejmeks staging of
Mickiewiczs Forefathers; Mrozeks and Jerzy Andrejewskis protest against the
invasion of Czechoslovakia; and Henryk Grynbergs exit from the country. A
decade later, the I published a long article by the dissident Adam Michnik
on the new democratic opposition in Poland (1977.56: 45), just when the
author was once more arrested. Note that all this concerns the politics of literature and cultural life rather than their actual content. The two are interrelated, but the perspectival differences are significant.
Compared to this wealth of material on Polish literature, Czechoslovak literature selcom appeared on the pages of the I. Of course, it printed as a lead
article Pavel Tigrids travel report on his four-day visit to Hungary (1964.20:
4). At a time when Hungarian exiles could not or would not want to visit their
home country, this editor of Svedectv, the Czech sister exile journal, was
allowed, surprisingly, to attend a conference of the international PEN Club as
President of the Writers Abroad Section (the Hungarian authorities resisted
the Czechoslovak request and refused to extradite him). By the mid-60s, news
about Prague multiplied, although, in retrospect, not as dramatically as it
should have. The I did print in the November 15, 1965 issue a letter by the
philosopher Ivan Svitk from Prague, but next year we find only one account
of the events in Prague, in the February 15 issue. In 1967, the Slovak reformcommunist Ladislav Mnacko was particularly prominent in the I: his new
book Wie die Macht schmeckt (How Power Tastes; 1967) was reviewed in the
May 1 issue, and the September 15 issue reported at length on his declarations
abroad that he will return to Czechoslovakia only when his coutry resumes
diplomatic relations with Israel.
Of course, 1968 became Is Czech year. It reported on Novotnys fall in
January and on the first manifestations of a Prague Spring (1968.67: 1). In
the remaining issues of the year, Fejto, Mray, and Enczi published reports,
news analyses, and commentaries. Pter Kende [Endre Pntek] titled his con-
224
demnation of the Hungarian participation of the Czechoslovak invasion We

Became the Accomplices of Crooks (1968.15: 3). The journal continued its
reports on Prague in 1969, and, on a reduced level, in 1970; but attention revived actually only in 1977, related to the Charta 77 declaration, to which I
gave ample space, noting that thirty-four Hungarians signed it at home under
the motto that this was a joint affair (1977.12: 1). The I noted also that
some Romanian writers, including Paul Goma, have joined. The next issue offered further space to him, and said farewell to one of the initiators of
Charta 77, the Czech phenomenologist, Jan Patocka (1977.34: 20).
The I slowly but perceptibly shifted its attention in the 1970s to Romania,
but the perspective of that attention underwent radical changes. In 1968, a
chorus of praise greeted Ceausescus refusal to join Czechoslovakias invasion, often coupled with ironic comments on Kdrs willing support of it.
However, gradually it became evident that Ceausescus nationalist defiance of
the Soviet Union went hand in hand with an internal dictatorship, of which
the minorities were the worst victims. Open protest against the Romanian
policy was impossible in Hungary, and thus the migr press had to speak up,
often with chauvinist overtones. Albert Wass and others believed that returning Transylvania to Hungary was the only solution (See Borbndi ltnk
272273). Since Populism was particularly strong in Transylvania, the L devoted in the 1970s and 80s much attention to the problems of Hungarian
political, cultural, and literary life in Transylvania (Borbndi, ltnk 332, 347,
41112, 470, 498).
The suppression of the Hungarian minority in Transylvania became gradually a central issue for the I as well. It succeeded in taking a strong stand
without falling prey to chauvinism, but, inevitably, exile contacts between
Hungarians and Romanians suffered, even in Paris, where the two exile cultures lived, so to speak, around the corner from each other. The I had devoted some attention to Romanian literature in the 1960s. It followed the
scandal that developed around Vintila Horias Prix-Goncourt-winning novel
Dieu est n en exil (God was Born in Exile); it printed Petru Dumitrius essay
For what can I thank the Party? soon as the exiled writer arrived in Paris
(1961.16: 5); and it also reviewed his novel Incognito (1963.8: 9). Frigyes Naschitz published an article on Paris and the Romanian writers Panait Istrati,
E.M. Cioran, Virgil Gheorghiu, and, of course, Eugne Ionesco (1996.12: 4).
This promising beginning found no continuation, even though opportunities arose. In 1971, the dissident Romanian writer Dumitru Tepeneag settled
in Paris and started the Cahiers dEst, the only exile journal that explicitly
aimed at building transnational bridges. As the I reported, he lost his Romanian citizenship (1975.1112: 24). Cahiers dEst appointed Fejto and
225
Gyrgy Aranyossi to its Board, and it devoted its eighth issue totally to Hungarian literature, featuring, among others, Konrd, Lszl Nagy, Ferenc Juhsz, Pter Hajnczy, and such stalwarts of the I as Fejto, Faludy, Hatr,
Tardos, Kende, Kibdi-Varga, Pter Halsz, Magda Zaln, dm Br, and
Gyrgy Mikes. Unfortunately, Tepeneags initiative found hardly any echo,
and the contacts with the exiled Romanian writers withered. The publication
of Paul Gomas recollection of 1956 in the May/June 1977 issue of I was an
exception. In short: the exiled Romanian and Hungarian writers were just as
unable to form a common front against Ceausescus regime as their colleagues behind the Iron Curtain. The major Hungarian/Romanian event on
the pages of I was a difficult exchange between Elemr Illys and Ion
Ratiu, a leading Romanian exile living in London (1984.2: 78 and 1985.1: 6),
in which both parties accused the other of cooperating with the communists
at home.
Considering that the East-Central European nations suffered a common
fate, and considering that London and, especially, Paris, were centers of EastCentral European exile cultures, it is rather astonishing that so little attention
was devoted to the literature of the neighbors. As a result, I and the other
exile journals could offer very little help after 1989, when cooperation between
the countries in East-Central Europe became a problematic desideratum.
7. Cultural Trends in Western Societies

Radically new Western approaches to literature, literary history, and the humanities emerged in the decades 196090 theoretical approaches that relied
in part on such earlier East-European initiatives as the Russian Formalism,
the Prague Linguistic Circle, and the work of the Russian literary theoretician
Mikhail Bakhtin. The breeding ground of many these new theories in linguistics, literary theory, semiotics, structuralism, post-structuralism, postmodernism, and deconstruction was Paris, though after an initial resistance
American variants came to reshape the humanities of American academia as
well. From Germany came the neo-Marxist theory of the Frankfurter
Schule and reception aesthetics. The feminist movement in literature was especially strong in France and in the US. Last but not least, linguistic turns
with different meanings took place in analytic philosophy and post-modern
thought.
This is not the place to survey all these complex theories and currents that
often clashed with each other. Suffice to say for our purposes that in diverse
way they have undermined authority and democratized reading. They did
226
so, by claiming that language, especially literary language, carried no clear

messages but was multibly interpretable. The new approaches dislodged the
authors from their position of authority, and encouraged readers to rely on
their personal and historical experience.
Admittedly, as we noted earlier, the possibilities of exile journals like the I
were severely limited, both on account of its readers interests and the orientation of its contributors. Still, in retrospect it remains puzzling that it could
ignore theories (and practices) subversive of authoritarian ideologies in
politics and aesthetics: the continental revolution in literature, literary theory,
and linguistic philosophy hardly showed up on the radar of the I (or on that
of the L). We shall look in vain in the index for the names of Ferdinand
Saussure, Walter Benjamin, Noam Chomsky, Claude Lvy-Strauss, Jacques
Derrida, Michel Foucault, Grard Genette, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Jrgen Habermas, Hans Robert Jauss, Wolfgang Iser, and the other
creative and innovative literary-philosophical minds of the epoch. The only
the name we find there is Roland Barthes, to whom Gyula Sipos [Albert Pl]
devoted an article in the July 15, 1967 issue, summarizing the polemics that
Barthess book on Racine generated with its assertion that literary works have
multiple meanings. Friedrich Nietzsche, perhaps the most important inspiration of continental thinking in the second half of the century, shows up primarily because the Hanser Edition of his works debunked some of the myths
around him (1958.2: 8); Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger appear
once each in articles by Tibor Hank (1962.17: 8 and 1971.3: 8). Though the
I and the L boasted among their contributors such distinguished linguists
as dm Makkai, Gyrgy Kassai, Jnos Gergely, and Tams Bogyai, the linguistic turns were not discussed on their pages. Gergely Lehotzky devoted a
supplement of I to Bernard-Henri Lvy, Andr Glucksmann, Alain Finkielkraut, and the other new French philosophers that broke with Marxism
(1977.78: 58), but the journal did not publish analyses of their works. Some
other distinguished cultural figures were probably named in passing (Michel
Foucault, for instance, is not in the index though Lehotzky mentions him),
but such references are good only for chatting at cocktail-parties and receptions.
Once more, the matter is puzzling, since many of these new notions of literature and literary criticism were developed and published under the very
eyes of the Hungarian literati in Paris, often by migrs and exiles from Eastern Europe, such as the Lithuanian Algirdas Julien Greimas, the Russian
Roman Jakobson, and the Bulgarians Julia Kristeva and Tzvetan Todorov.
None of these names occurs in the index of the I; not even the name of the
famous Hungarian semiotician Thomas Sebeok. We find only an obituary in
227
the I of Peter Szondi, the brilliant literary theorist and critic of Hungarian
origin, who tragically and prematurely died in Berlin.
Taking the issue a step further, we may wonder why we find, apart from
Peter Szondi (Sebeoks semiotics was tangential to literature) so few Hungarians among the literary and cultural innovators during the second half of the
twentieth century. The great figure of Gyrgy Lukcs did remain on Is
agenda, mostly because his work was the main research subject of the journals chief philosophical contributor, Tibor Hank. Occasional articles on
him by Fejto were highly critical. As Hank wrote in his review of Lukcss
final opus magnum, he became detached from our age because he followed in his literary judgments and his philosophy ideals of the nineteenthcentury (1987.2.21). Indeed, interest in Lukcss work on Marxist literary
theory dwindled by the second half of the century. The exciting and relevant
part of his legacy, which should have received more attention in the I, was
the pre-Marxist work of his youth, which was also a point of departure for the
neo-Marxist work of the Romanian/French Lucien Goldmann (Le Dieu cach;
1956). Once more, Goldmann does not appear in Is index.
Approaching the matter from yet another angle, this shortcoming appears
less accidental, and hardly attributable to alleged limitations in Is (and Ls)
readership, its lacking literary sophistication and low interest in abstract philosophical arguments. The divergent new currents did not satisfy the historical,
political, and psychological needs that most exile readers brought to the reading of literature: structuralism was abstract, often arid, and pretentiously
scientific, while the often opaque poststructuralist and postmodern texts
expressed grave doubts about the validity of that approach, but revealed a
skepticism with respect to language and communication. As we mentioned,
reviews and reports of exile literati concerning contemporary literature and
performances indicate that they had difficulty with the message that all messages were fundamentally and linguistically ambiguous.
That exiles were not per se hostile to the new currents is evident if we look
at Kultura, which gave space to the great anti-traditionalist Witold Gombrowicz, or, closer to home, at the Magyar Muhely, which was founded by the Hungarian anti-traditionalists in 1962. The literary conservatism of the I, as well
as that of all the other Hungarian publications in the West, may ultimately be
traceable perhaps to the conservatism of Hungarian Modernism in general.
What, then, was Is image of two cultural fields in which Hungarians
were, indeed, in the forefront during the twentieth century: music and
science? I gave ample space to the music of Bartk and Kodly, primarily
but not only, in articles by Jnos Gergely. It followed also the national and international activities of the Hungarian conductors, orchestras, and soloists.
228
Is record in the natural sciences and mathematics is more uneven. It did

print Michael Polnyis lead article on Science and Tyranny (1958.17: 1), and
his reflections on the resurrection of humanism (1961.4: 1). However, the
next generation of brilliant Hungarian scientists, which included the biologist
Albert Szentgyrgyi, the mathematician Jnos ( John) Neumann, and the
triumvirate of physicists, Leo Szilrd, Ede (Eduard) Teller, and Jeno (Eugene)
Wigner remained marginal, which is especially surprising if we consider that
the readership included many engineers and scientists.
One more omission should finally be mentioned: Imre Lakatos, who became a leading philosopher of science in the generation following Karl Popper.
After leaving Hungary in 1956, Lakatos lived in England, where he not only developed his theory of research programmes but also became an active public
opponent of the 1968 student demands at the London School of Economics
(Congdon 12843). Though some lugubre details of his Hungarian past became known only in 1997, after his death and after the folding of the I, he was
sufficiently in the limelight in the 1960s and early 70s to merit attention.
Such lacunae in coverage are regretful but understandable. The I admirably fulfilled a task under highly difficult political and financial conditions.
Tibor Mray was justified in concluding the last issue with the words: we too
have fought our battle (1989.4: 3).
Works Cited
Aczl, Tams, and Tibor Mray. The Revolt of the Mind. A Case History of Intellectual Resistance
Behind the Iron Curtain. New York: Praeger, 1959.
Borbndi, Gyula. A magyar emigrci letrajza (Biography of the Hungarian Emigration). 2
vols. Budapest: Eurpa, 1989.
Borbndi, Gyula A magyar npi mozgalom (The Hungarian Populist Movement). New York:
Pski, 1983. Trans. Of the German Der ungarische Populismus. Mainz: v. Haase & Khler,
1976.
Borbndi, Gyula. Nem ltnk hiba. Az j Lthatr ngy vtizede (We did not Live in Vain.
The Four Decennia of j Lthatr). Budapest: Eurpa, 2000.
Borbndi, Gyula. Nyugati Magyar irodalmi lexicon s bibliogrfia (Lexicon and Bibliography of
Western Hungarian Literature). Budapest: Hitel, 1992.
Congdon, Lee. Seeing Red. Hungarian Intellectuals in Exile and the Challenge of Communism. De
Kalb: Northern Illinois UP, 2001.
Cseres, Tibor. Hideg napok (Cold Days). Budapest: Magveto, 1964.
Faludy, Gyrgy. Pokolbli napjaim utn (After my Days in Hell). Budapest: Magyar Vilg
Kiad, 2000.
Darvas, Jzsef. Kormos g (Sooty Sky). Budapest; Szpirodalmi, 1959.
Fldes, Anna. Az Irodalmi jsg knyve (Book of the Literary Gazette). Budapest: Szphalom Knyvmuhely, 2001.
229
Gara, Ladislas, ed. La Gazette Littraire organe des crivains hongrois 2. novembre 1956 [trad. complete] numro unique paru pendant linsurrection hongroise (Literary Gazette, Organ of the
Hungarian Writers, November 2, 1956 [complete translation] of the Unique Number
that Appeared during the Hungarian Insurrection). Paris: Horay, 1956.
Gombos, Gyula. Szab Dezso. Munich: Molnr, 1966.
Halsz, Pter. Msodik Avenue (Second Avanue). Toronto: Pannonia, 1967.
Ignotus, Paul. Brtnnaplm: Prza dalban elbeszlve (My Prison Diary: Prose told in Song).
Munich: Lthatr, 1957.
Ignotus, Paul. Hungary. London: Benn, 1972.
Irodalmi jsg. Facs. Rpt. 8 vols. Budapest: Bethlen Gbor, 199193.
Irodalmi jsg la gazzetta letteraria ungherese del due novembre [trad. E. N. Adattamento, Vittorio
Pagano]. Bari: Laterza, 1957.
Mrai, Sndor. Halotti Beszd (Funeral Sermon). Lthatr (Munich) 1951.
Mray, Tibor. A prizsi vrtn. rsok a Szajna melll (On Guard in Paris. Writing from the
Banks of the Seine). 2 vols. Marosvsrhely: Mentor, 2000.
Mikes, Gyrgy. How to be an Alien. A Handbook for Beginners and more advanced Pupils. London:
Deutsch, 1946.
Mnacko, Ladislav. Wie die Macht schmeckt (How Power Tastes). Stuttgart, Deutscher Bcherbund, 1967.
Nagy, Csaba, ed. Irodalmi jsg 19571989. Dokumentumok a lap trtnetbol (Literary Gazette
19571989. Documents from the History of the Journal). Budapest: Argumentum,
1993.
Saunders, Frances Stonor. Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War. London:
Granta, 2000.
Szab, Dezso. leteim (My Lives). Budapest: Szpirodalmi, 1965.
230
The Hungarian Mikes Kr and Magyar Muhely :

Personal Recollections
ron Kibdi Varga
1. Refugee Groups and their Cultural Life, 19451956

In 1945 politically different groups of refugees arrived in Austria and Germany, mostly conservative followers of Horthy and the Nazis. Some went to
Argentina, where they established their cultural associations, journals, and
publishing houses that printed mostly well-known conservative Hungarian
novelists before 1945, for instance Dezso Szab and Mikls Surnyi. There
was even a Hungarian Theater Company (Magyar Sznjtsz Trsulat) in Buenos Aires, directed between 1948 and 1954 by the famous Hungarian actor
Antal Pger, which had much success even with the Spanish-speaking Argentinean public (on Buenos Aires as an exile center, see the introductory
essay in this volume).
Some other 1945 right-wing writers, like Jzsef Nyro from Transylvania,
settled in Spain. Albert Wass (see John Neubauers article on him below), a
less gifted and more openly anti-Semitic Transylvanian novelist, spent several
years in Germany and was subsequently admitted to the US. He settled in
Florida and worked at the University of Florida in Gainesville, all the while
writing essays, novels, and stories for children, as well as engaging in various
publishing activities.
In Europe, each group had its own cultural life, which often involved publishing a newspaper that tended to be ephemeral. I just mention a few. The
Arrow-Cross movement published in Bavaria the Hdverok (Bridge Builders;
194862), a paper that was very hostile to the refugees of 194749, who were
mostly anti-Nazi democrats forced out of the country after the communists
assumed power, and the postwar initiatives towards democracy were annulled.
The latter group included the writers Sndor Mrai, Zoltn Szab, Lszl Cs.
Szab, Lajos Zilahy, as well as a number of politicians from the Peasant and
the Smallholders Parties. The conservative exile newspapers included the
more moderate Hungria (194856) and the j Hungria (New Hungary;
The Hungarian Mikes Kr and Magyar Muhely (ron Kibdi Varga)
231
195371), which were linked to the Hungarian National Committee (Magyar

Nemzeti Bizottmny) in New York, a kind of US-supported government in
exile. The Hdverok attacked the members of this Committee, alleging that they
sold Hungary to the Americans. Finally, we should mention the Katolikus Szemle
(Catholic Review; 194995) in Rome, a religious and, especially, literary review, directed for very long time by the theologian and poet Gellrt Bks.
There were also Hungarian bookshops. Sndor Pski opened his New
York bookstore in 1970; the Socit Balaton (where one could also buy Hungarian salami!), functioned in Paris, whereas Andreas Jaritz had a store in Munich, which sold also recent editions of classical Hungarian authors like Petofi
or Jkai, printed in communist Hungary. To warn his readers and to excuse
himself, he commented in his catalogue that the introductions in the books
poured a communist sauce over the classical novels and poems.
The Katolikus Szemle and some other reviews and cultural organizations occasionally published books as well. Of the genuine publishing houses I want to
mention two. In Cologne, the Dominican priest Jeromos Fenyvessy founded
in 1948 the Amerikai Magyar Kiad (American-Hungarian Publisher), which
could boast more than 2000 titles with more than one million copies by 1966.
They included two new plays by Nyro, several essays by the Catholic philosopher Bla Brandenstein, and poetry volumes by Alajos Kanns and Tams
Tuz. In Washington, the former politician Istvn Csicsery-Rnay founded in
1954 the Occidental Press, which preferred quality to quantity and published
much fewer titles. They included the Hungarian translation of Gatan Picons
famous Panorama des ides contemporaines (1960), books by the political essayist
Gyula Gombos and the philosopher Lszl Vatai, Sndor Mrais diaries, and,
later, anthologies of poetry written about 1956. It also published two volumes
of my own poetry. Csicsery-Rnay repatriated his Press in 1989.
Searching for what was lasting and worthwhile in Hungarian exile literature,
one has to admit that it did not match the literary production of the period in
Hungary, or even the Hungarian literature written in Transylvania. We can survey it as easily as, say, the Hungarian literature written in Slovakia: writers of the
exile/migr group formed a relatively small group, usually knew each other,
and read each others works. The bibliography of Hungarian cultural life
abroad (including its neighbors with large Hungarian minorities) is large but of
uneven quality. So are the bibliographies themselves. The most important ones
were compiled by Gyula Borbndi, who worked for Radio Free Europe in Munich and was co-editor of the journal j Lthatr (New Horizon). Next to A
Magyar emigrci letrajza, 19451985 (Biography of the Hungarian Emigration;
1989), Nyugati Magyar irodalmi lexikon s bibliogrfia (Western Hungarian Literary
Lexicon and Bibliography; 1992), and Emigrci s Magyarorszg (Emigration
232
and Hungary; 1996), he also published a book on the populist movement:

A magyar npi mozgalom (The Hungarian Populist Movement; 1983).
Ferenc Mros encyclopedia, Az Emigrcis Magyar Irodalom Lexikona (Lexicon of the Hungarian migr Literature; 1966), gives a broad view of various
cultural activities all over the world, especially in Europe, the US, and Latin
America. But it also shows one of the main problems of emigration, the lack of
Nachbarschaftskontrolle, evaluation by the neighbors: in the absence of a well-organized literary life there is no selectivity. Mro includes, and even praises, a
multitude of very mediocre writers, unevenly and often inaccurately. The only
Mikes Kelemen Kr he mentions is a Munich-based Hungarian right-wing organization founded in 1959 that published books by Nazis like Ferenc Fiala. He
does not list our earlier-founded Mikes Kelemen Kr (Kelemen Mikes Circle),
which was forced to change its name to Hollandiai Mikes Kelemen Kr in order to
avoid confusion with the Munich one. Mro mentions Istvn Csicsery-Rnay,
but not his Occidental Press; and he omits Ferenc Fejto and Baron Bertalan
Hatvany, although they played a key role among emigrant writers and supported the younger ones, especially in Paris. Both were close friends of the poet
Attila Jzsef, and founded with him in 1935 in Budapest the literary review Szp
Sz (Beautiful Word). In 1938 Fejto went into exile in order to escape a jail sentence, and came to work for the Agence France Press (AFP). He became famous with his book Histoire des dmocraties populaires (History of the Popular
Democracies; 1962), while Hatvany, who had supported Jzsef financially and
also left Hungary in 1938, became fascinated by Chinese culture and published
in 1957 a Hungarian translation of the Taoist Chinese classic Tao Te Ching.
The 1950 launching of the journal Lthatr in Switzerland and its subsequent move to Munich substantially raised the quality of the Hungarian literary journals abroad. The editors, who came to work for Radio Free Europe,
succeeded in attracting as contributors Lszl Cs. Szab, Zoltn Szab, Imre
Kovcs, and other important Hungarian exiled writers living in Western Europe, with the exception of Lajos Zilahy and Sndor Mrai, both of whom
preferred to work on their own larger projects, and eventually moved to
America. Lthatr published articles on political, literary, and other topics,
ranging from Hungarian agriculture to Proust and Thackeray, The main criterion of literary criticism was that it had to concern writers deemed to be
good. After the 1956 Revolution, new journals were founded; the most important of these were the conservative Nemzetor (National Guard; 195690),
published in Germany, and the Irodalmi jsg (195790), published first in
London and from 1962 onward in Paris (see John Neubauers article above).
At a London meeting in March 1957, the Association of Hungarian Writers
Abroad (Magyar Irk Szvetsge Klfldn) was founded, and the Irodalmi
233
jsg of Budapest was re-launched, both with funding from the Congress
for Cultural Freedom, a CIA front organization. At a large Congress in
Paris next year, long discussions were held between the npi (inadequately
translated as populist) and the urbnus writers. The npi movement was
composed of writers some tending to the right-wing others to Marxism
whose literary-sociological studies and novels directed attention to the misery of the Hungarian peasants, who still constituted the majority of the Hungarian population in the 1930s. The urbnus writers were often Jews, mostly
living in Budapest. They were more open to influences from the West and
they had less interest for rural Hungarian themes. As a contributor of Lthatr, I attended a whole-night npi meeting, at which Imre Kovcs ordered
and paid for the wine. In the end, Pl Ignotus, considered an urbnus, became President, and the npi Zoltn Szab secretary; the Association rarely
met, and ceased to exist in 1961. In spite of differences, the exiled writers did
not revive the famous npi/urbnus conflict of the 1930s, though Lthatr
and its successor, j Lthatr, had a npi orientation and Irodalmi jsg an urbnus one.
2. The Hollandiai Mikes Kelemen Kr (1951) and

the Magyar Muhely (1962)
By the 1970s, the Hungarian Kdr-regime was considered as the most liberal
among the communist regimes. Cultural policy was managed by Kdrs close
friend, Gyrgy Aczl, who was very interested in literature and read not only
writers living and publishing in Hungary but also many Hungarian reviews
and writers living in the West. This cultural liberalism meant that writers like
Sndor Weres and the Catholic Jnos Pilinszky were allowed to publish; even
some works of the esoteric Bla Hamvas could appear. However, this liberalism had a price: writers were expected to exercise auto-censorship a topic to
which the Mikes Kr dedicated a special conference in 1980. Certain subjects
were taboo: the revolution of 1956 could only be named and treated as a
counter-revolution, as in Jzsef Darvass play Kormos g (Sooty Sky; 1959), and
mentioning the execution of Imre Nagy was strictly forbidden. Erzsbet Galgczys novel Kzs bun, which takes place in 1956, could be published only
with great delay, in 1976. In Vidravas (Otter Iron), published in 1984 and soon
translated into several languages, Galgczy tested the limits, by portraying the
terrible anxiety of innocent people during the Rkosi-regime: a couple seeing
each morning a police car before their house from which policemen observed
them, or an old woman committing suicide.
234
On the whole, most authors living in Hungary accepted the task of selfcensorship; as to the Hungarian writers and organizations abroad, the authorities at home fostered a division among them. This was the background of
most tensions within and between Hungarian groups and organizations,
which I shall now exemplify with the Magyar Muhely (Atelier Hongrois/Hungarian Workshop) in France and the Hollandiai Mikes Kelemen Kr (to be abbreviated henceforth as Mikes).
The name Magyar Muhely reminds most of us immediately and curiously of
the well-known novelist and populist ideologue Lszl Nmeth, though
Tibor Papp, its co-founder, recently protested against this link and prefers to
regard Istvn Bib, member of the Imre Nagy 1956 revolutionary government, as the organizations inspiring figure. The link is curious, because Nmeth was a populist rather than avant-garde writer, but Nmeths concept of a
Hungarian Workshop fits because it suggested that one should create works
in a both Hungarian and international spirit. The founders of the Magyar
Muhely were perhaps not consciously avant-garde at the outset; the first stories
written by Pl Nagy and Lszl Mrton testify to this.
Tongue in cheek, I would add that the activities of the Magyar Muhely remind one of Nmeth in another sense as well. He did not support the Communist regime, but he was not insensible to the homage it paid him, and he
even accepted an invitation to visit the Soviet Union in 1959, about which he
wrote a report that many in the West found disturbing. I heard him myself remark in the seventies, surrounded by a few younger Hungarian writers in his
garden at Sajkd, near lake Balaton: believe me, Jnos Kdr is the least evil
(a legkisebb rossz) we can have. (To which I heard Istvn Ersi respond: I
would like to live in a country where one would not be obliged to accept the
least evil regime.)
Like Lszl Nmeth, the Magyar Muhely accepted certain limitations. In
order to reach Hungary they never published anything political, and, indeed,
in the seventies and eighties it was much easier to find copies of it in Hungary
than of the Irodalmi jsg or of j Lthatr, (you could not find them in every
bookshop, though). However, one should add that the Magyar Muhely used this
relative freedom in order to introduce avant-garde writings in Hungary. It
supported the Hungarian installation artists Mikls Erdly and Istvn Haraszty, and they published studies on, or works by, writers whom the regime
disliked, such as Sndor Weres, one of the greatest Hungarian poets of the
twentieth century, and Mikls Szentkuthy, author of many bizarre historical
novels, especially of Prae (1934), a huge avant-garde novel about what one
should do before starting to write a novel. Weres had, however, an unpleasant experience during the sixties with Tuzkt (Fire Well), a manuscript of
235
poetry. Hungarian publishers refused to accept it, but Magyar Muhely and
Mikes raised funds to publish it in the West at a Romanian printer (the editors
of Magyar Muhely worked there to earn a living, and they could use the machines in the evening for their own purposes). Weres delivered the manuscript and it was published, but the poet got into trouble when he returned to
Hungary: he adopted a clever strategy by stating in an open letter to a newspaper that he had nothing to do with the publication.
By drawing attention to important artists and writers that the communist
regime neglected, Magyar Muhely did what the eminent but silenced literary
critic Balzs Lengyel told us during a meeting (in Brussels or in Marly-le-Roi):
Your task is to establish a Hamburg standard. There is much fraud and corruption at the international boxing championships because millions of dollars
are at stake. This is why specialists gather once a year in Hamburg to establish
a reliable ranking and decide who the best one really is. Your task here in the
West is to establish the Hamburg standard for Hungarian literature.
The choice of the name Kelemen Mikes is also interesting: we, all of us
2025 year-old students, chose him in 1951 for romantic reasons. Kelemen
Mikes was the page of Prince Ferenc Rkczy II, who led an insurrection
against the Habsburg rulers but lost and was forced into exile, first to France
and then to the small village of Tekirdag (Rodost in Hungarian) on the Bosporus in Turkey. Mikes, the youngest of the small exile community and its last
survivor, spent his exile years by translating French novels and, most importantly, writing letters to a fictive aunt in Constantinople. The posthumous
discovery of these letters made Mikes famous, and they are now considered as
one of the highlights of eighteenth-century Hungarian literature.
We were young and knew little about Mikes; for us, he embodied literature
in political solitude, far from home, as in Jzsef Lvays famous poem
Mikes, written in 1848: Mikes yearns for his home in Transylvania but his
country is held in slavery and he prefers freedom, even if it means that he
must be supported by the Sultan. This impressed us. Years later I discovered
reading Mikes seriously that he was much more interesting. In spite of his sad
daily routine, Mikes had an extraordinary sense of humor, a Szkely humor
that makes one think of ron Tamsi, the most famous twentieth-century
Hungarian-Szkely writer. And I am sure, Borges would have been delighted
to read Mikess seventy-fifth letter, in which he tells his fictive aunt to throw
away his letters because they are not worth much, but he will keep hers for
they are much better: the non-existing should survive, not the real ones!
When we started Mikes in 1951, we knew what was going on in Hungary: it
was one of the worst years of the Rkosi regime. It was the time when my
father told me that my grandmother had asked not to write even Christmas
236
greetings on an open post card because it was too dangerous for her. At a
meeting in Utrecht, members of the Mikes discussed that if we gather to speak
Hungarian we must risk of having an informant among us who would report
to the Hungarian Embassy. Later I concluded that there must have been an informant: in 1965 I went to The Hague to get my first visa for Hungary, by accident a day after the Mikes General Assembly had elected the new Board. The
press attach handed me my visa remarking: You had your Assembly yesterday, didnt you? And X. and Y. have been elected as new Board members! He
revealed with visible pleasure that he was well informed. We were eager to
protect our intellectual freedom in other respects too, for instance by avoiding reliance on external funding. I know of one such support only, a grant
from the Societ Europenne de Culture.
The Magyar Muhely was founded by writers who had published in j Lthatr, but decided in 1962 to establish their own review. I remember their discussion about this with Gyula Borbndi in Munich: they found that the Munich journal devoted too much attention to politics. The founders of Magyar
Muhely included Pl Nagy, Tibor Papp, Lszl Mrton, and the internationally
acclaimed sculptor Ervin Ptkai (to whom Kartson devotes an affectionate
chapter in Otthonok). They were joined later by Alpr Bujdos from Vienna.
One could consider the Magyar Muhely as a literary movement with its own review, like fifty years earlier, when the surrealists of Andr Breton had their reviews Littrature and La Rvolution surraliste. They published also novels, and
poetry volumes by the editors and other contributors to the review.
The Magyar Muhely did not publish only. It resembled Mikes in that it also organized activities. In 1967 it started to organize conferences, first in Marly-leRoi near Paris, and later in Hadersdorf near Vienna. These were also attended
by official Hungarian delegates, notably by the critic Mikls Bldi, who was
charged by the regime to establish contact with Hungarian writers in the
West reason enough for Mikes never to invite him, though he was a very likeable person. When he attended the Magyar Muhely conferences, he stuffed his
car with books and reviews, for he, officially sent to the meeting, was allowed
to bring them back Hungary. The Hungarian border guard once confiscated
all the books in Bldis car, in spite of his protest. He could get them back
only much later, in Budapest.
There was much contact between the Magyar Muhely and Mikes. Members of
each often attended the conferences of the other organization. A third group,
Hungarian doctors, engineers and other professionals from Germany and
Belgium, visited both conferences. There were, of course, also some incidents, most famous them being the flag affair at a Mikes conference in the
early seventies. Traditionally, the Saturday evenings were reserved for the reci-
237
tation of work by the writers and poets, followed by music and dance. Mikls
Erdly, a leading avant-guard artist from Budapest who worked together with
the Magyar Muhely, once came with his Parisian friends to the Mikes conference
and persuaded them to put the Hungarian flag on the ground to dance on it.
This made some other participants furious: they put issues of the Magyar
Muhely on the ground and began to dance on these. The affair ended in a bout
of wrestling, especially between Tibor Papp and the novelist Endre Kartson.
In spite of the numerous and usually very friendly contacts, the two institutions were structurally different. Mikes was not founded by creative writers
and artists, and it had no review though an online review, the Mikes International, has meanwhile been established in the 1990s. The members of Mikes
were students, as well as lawyers, doctors, university teachers, and other professionals, who got together on Sunday afternoons, first in Utrecht later in
Vianen, in order to talk about Hungarian politics, culture, folklore, and other
matters they could not discuss with their Dutch colleagues and friends. It was
an association with yearly membership dues, and a Board that was elected
each year. If the funds allowed it, we invited, even before 1956, famous Hungarian speakers from abroad, among them the Jungian scholar of comparative
religion Karl Kernyi from Switzerland, and Lszl Cs. Szab, Zoltn Szab,
and Gyozo Hatr from London. The tenth anniversary of Mikes was commemorated in 1961 by Cs. Szabs lecture, delivered in Utrecht Universitys
ceremonial hall.
Upon the initiative of Dezso Prgay (a participant of the 1956 revolution
who was sentenced to death by the Kdr-regime) the Mikes launched in 1959
in Doorn the so-called Study Days (Tanulmnyi Napok), a week-long conference to which we invited Hungarian writers and scholars from other European countries. Over the years, these conferences had a stimulating, even inspiring, effect on the regularly participating writers, as several of them told us
and stated in writing. These conferences started on Monday morning, with a
break on Thursday that was used for bus-excursions. The first excursion took
us to Aachen, Cologne, and to Amsterdam where we nearly missed the reception the Lord Mayor offered us. In the later format, still used today, the
conference takes only three days. In contrast to the Magyar Muhely, Mikes did
not publish books, except for the conference proceedings, of which eleven
volumes appeared in irregular intervals.
While the Magyar Muhely held a fairly consistent attitude towards the regime
at home, Mikes conducted intense and long discussions to determine our attitude towards the Kdr-regime. The two major problems were, whether individual members should travel to Hungary and Romania, and whether we
should invite speakers from these countries to our conferences. The decision
238
to see parents and friends in communist countries was left to the individual.
Some did not go, others went in order to see parents or to attend class reunions (rettsgi tallkoz); I myself went to see an uncle and an aunt, and was one
of the first to visit, perhaps because I had left Hungary already as a child
in 1944, not in 1956. When I went for the first time, in 1965, I met Mrta
Srkzi, the daughter of Ferenc Molnr and the mother of Mtys Srkzi.
The latter worked for Radio Free Europe and the Hungarian section of BBC,
which made it impossible for him (from both sides) to go to Hungary. She put
me into contact with three Hungarian poets, Andrs Fodor, Ferenc Juhsz,
and Lszl Nagy. In the seventies and eighties, when I went to Hungary primarily to meet writers, I befriended Jnos Pilinszky, Sndor Weres, and Mikls Mszly. I saw them in their home in Budapest, and I especially remember
Pilinszkys terrifying stories (he had an incredible way of telling them): during
the Rkosi-regime he had to earn his living as a corrector at the Partys daily
newspaper. All correctors were anxiety ridden about printing errors, for this
would be considered a political sabotage and lead to their immediate arrest.
While many Mikes members returned regularly to Hungary, others refused
to go as long as the communist regime lasted. When Zoltn Szab was invited
by the village of Tard, about which he published his famous sociological study
A tardi helyzet (The Tard Situation; 1935), he refused, and suggested that the
people of the village should come instead to London, he would pay their
travel expenses. He died in 1984, without ever having returned. This was initially also the position of Hatr and Cs. Szab, both of whom refused to apply
for a visa to a communist government but they changed their mind later.
The second question, whether to invite speakers from communist countries, was a much more complicated one, because this had to be decided collectively rather than individually. We had no problem with inviting speakers
from Titos Yugoslavia and we did, indeed, invite already in 1966 two Hungarian literary historians from Novi Sad (jvidk), Imre Bori and Istvn Szeli.
The Novi Sad review j Symposion, led by Ott Tolnai, Beta Thomka, and
Magdolna Danyi, was, together with the Magyar Muhely, the most modern literary journal in the Hungarian language, one that was the most open to the
West. These two were read in Hungary secretly and most eagerly. In those
years, Mikes did not have much contact with the Hungarian minorities in
Slovakia and Ukraine; Hungary and Romania were the problems that Mikes
started to discuss as early as 1966. We finally decided to invite a group of
writers and literary critics from Hungary, not for 1966, the tenth anniversary
of 1956 (which would certainly have been unproductive), but for 1967. We
were not free to choose, for we had to accept the counterproposition of the
Hungarian Embassy. As its press attach put it: a captain does not ask the
239
opinion of his adversary in a soccer game, he considers the game as a confrontation. Finally we agreed that a delegation of seven would come, with two
officials and Party members, one of them being Mikls Szabolcsi, a wellknown academician and author of several books on Hungarian and European
literature. Some older and very influential writers of Mikes firmly opposed this
agreement. Cs. Szab, whom we called our form-master (osztlyfonk), refused
to come to a conference where he would be obliged to meet Szabolcsi. He had
been coming every year to the Mikes conferences, but he did not return until
1975. One of the founders, Gyula Bn, shared his opinion and gave up his
membership. There were, however, some who regretted this attitude, for they
believed that Mikes was the only place where non-communists from Hungary
and abroad could freely meet and speak. At any rate, Mikes acquired with that
decision a leftist reputation. When my father, a philosopher in Munich and
commander of the Hungarian branch of St. Johns Knights, accepted my request to give a lecture at Mikes, Mikls Kenessey, a relative of Queen Beatrix
by marriage, asked him after the lecture why he had accepted an invitation
from such a left-wing association as Mikes.
A much deeper crisis occurred in 1971, involving not only friends from
outside but also many Mikes members, leading to a temporary break. The
question that divided us was how far we should cooperate with the Hungarian
authorities. Sndor Nmeth, one of the most active conference organizers,
and Erika Dedinszky, then President, wanted to organize in 1971 a Hungarian
cinema week and as the famous Hungarian movie director Mikls Jancs
told us this could not be done without a close cooperation with the Embassy. A majority refused to go along with this and called for an extraordinary
Assembly in November, at which the President was forced to resign. Nmeth
and Dedinszky decided to leave the Association, which led two years later to
the more radical split of two parallel conferences. The second one was supported by the Magyar Muhely and a few others like Endre Kartson, a good
friend of Nmeth, while the majority organized, in a rather provocative way, a
conference also dedicated to the avant-garde, to which we invited the art critic
Gza Perneczky from Germany, the daughter of Gyula Krdy from Budapest, and the editors of j Lthatr in Munich, who then published the lectures.
Since the Hungarian authorities sent every time an official delegation to the
conference, the Embassy also wanted to be present, but Mikes refused to
admit its representatives. Finally, we came to an agreement: a member of the
Embassy could attend the conference when, and only when, a speaker from
Hungary gave a lecture an opportunity of which the Embassy seldom
availed itself. The pre-conference discussions improved the contact between
240
Mikes and the Embassy, and in the eighties the Ambassador, Tivadar Kiss, invited the Mikes Board every year for dinner; Mikes accepted, on the condition
of exchange: the ambassador and his staff became dinner guests of Mikes in a
very elegant restaurant in The Hague.
Mikes had fewer non-Hungarian international contacts than the Magyar
Muhely. It remained essentially Hungarian, and had nearly no contact with
other countries or cultures, not even with its host country. In fifty years, we
had only two or three lectures in Dutch, and after 1989 we invited the Romanian poet Mircea Dinescu who had played a part in the anti-Ceausescu revolt and had much sympathy for Hungarians but that was all. We had Hungarian-speaking writers from abroad, but no writers who spoke and wrote in
Slovak or Szerb only. The Magyar Muhely was completely different in this respect, partly because they also published visual and computerized-interactive
poetry, two new genres that interested very much the Parisian artists and
opened contacts with them. Members of the Magyar Muhely came to be invited
thus to international festivals in France, Belgium, Italy, and the US, and they
befriended Jacques Roubaud, Jean-Pierre Faye, Francis Edeline, and others.
The Magyar Muhely also published books and a review in French (datelier) a
cosmopolitanism that Tibor Papps and Tams Prgays recent volume of interviews A plya mentn (2007) displays very well.
Contrary to others, Mikes never organized anything in Hungary after the regime change. Otto Tnczos, a former President, remembers that more than
hundred-fifty members came to the meeting on February 25, 1990 to discuss
what our organization should now do. We finally decided to stay in Holland,
to continue our meetings and conferences there, and to observe from there
events in Hungary, conditioned, as we were, by the famous Dutch common
sense. I need to mention this, because all other Hungarian cultural organizations, including the Magyar Muhely, the Roman Catholic Pax Romana
(KMM=Katolikus Magyar rtelmisgi Mozgalom), and the Protestant Free
University (Protestns Szabadegyetem), decided to organize their conferences in Hungary, and to include thus Hungarians, intellectuals, artists, and
theologians in their activities. Mikes preferred to invite people to Holland.
Between 1956 and 1989, officials thought that our activities and publications reflected a kind of nostalgia and homesickness. We protested violently
against this, for we believed that living in the West gave us the opportunity to
become acquainted with different ways of living and thinking, and this, in
turn, allowed us also to see Hungarian life and culture in a different way. This
was the meaning of our independent cultural platform.
Artists, writers, and scholars used to be very much interested in our organization, and were very happy to come if we paid their travel expenses. The
241
situation has changed since 1989. On the one hand, we have been pressured
to participate in domestic political quarrels, to choose for the right or the left;
on the other hand, enthusiasm to attend our conferences has diminished.
Hungarians could now travel and/or be invited by other, non-Hungarian organizations; Mikes had become less interesting to them and we have become
slightly disappointed.
Works Cited
Babus, Antal. Nmeth Lszl szovjetunibeli utazsa (Lszl Nmeths Travel in the Soviet Union). Kortrs 46.5 (2001): 115128.
Borbndi, Gyula. A Magyar emigrci letrajza, 19451985 (Biography of the Hungarian Emigration). 2 vols. Budapest: Eurpa Kiad, 1989.
Borbndi, Gyula .A magyar npi mozgalom (The Hungarian Populist Movement). New York:
Pski, 1983. Der ungarische Populismus. Mainz: Haase & Koehler, 1976.
Borbndi, Gyula. Emigrci s Magyarorszg (Emigration and Hungary). Budapest: Eurpai
Protestns Magyar Szabadegyetem, 1996.
Borbndi, Gyula. Nyugati Magyar irodalmi lexikon s bibliogrfia (Lexicon and Bibliography of
Hungarian Literature in the West). Budapest: Hitel, 1992.
Fejto, Ferenc. Histoire des dmocraties populaires (History of the Popular Democracies). Paris:
Seuil, 1962.
Gal, Eniko A hollandiai Mikes Kelemen Kr mint a nyugat-europai magyar emigrci
kulturlis fellegvra (The Mikes Kelemen Society of Holland as the Cultural Citadel of
the Hungarian Emigrants in Western Europe). Knya et al. 186274.
Galgczy, Erzsbet. Vidravas (Otter Iron). Budapest: Szpirodalmi, 1984.
Knya, Melinda, ron Kibdi Varga, and Zoltn Piri, ed. Szmads. Hollandiai Mikes Kelemen
Kr (19512001) (An Account. The Kelemen Mikes Society of Holland, 19512001). Ed.
Melinda Knya, ron Kibdi Varga, and Zoltn Piri. Bratislava: Kalligram, 2001.
Lao-tse. Tao Te Ching. Hung. trans. Bertalan Hatvany. Az t s az Ige knyve (Book of the
Road and the Verb). Munich: Lthatr, 1957.
Lvay, Jzsef. Mikes (1848). http://csicsada.freeblog.hu/archives/2007/11/23/Levay_
Jozsef_Mikes/
Mro, Ferenc. Emigrcis Magyar Irodalom Lexikona (Lexicon of the Hungarian migr Literature). Cologne, Detroit, Vienna: Amerikai Magyar Kiad, 1966.
Papp, Tibor, and Tams Prgay. A plya mentn (By the Side of the Field/Career/Tracks).
Budapest: Napkt, 2007.
Picon, Gatan, ed. Korunk szellemi krkpe (Intellectual Panorama of our Times). 2nd ed.
Washington, DC: Occidental P, 1963. Trans. of Panorama des ides contemporaines. 1960.
Szab, Zoltn. A tardi helyzet (The Tard Situation). Budapest: Cserpfalvi, 1935.
Szentkuthy, Mikls. Prae Budapest: Egyetemi Nyomda, 1934.
Weres, Sndor. Tuzkt (Fire Well). Paris: Magyar Muhely, 1964. Budapest: Magveto: 1964.
242
We did not want an migr journal:

Pavel Tigrid and Svedectv
Neil Stewart
Within the vast theoretical field of cultural criticism, the study of literary institutions remains a surprisingly little-charted territory. Most scholars would
readily agree that it is an important and somewhat neglected topic, but few
have ventured to give general guidelines on how to go about exploring it.
How, then, does one approach, analyze, or interpret a journal?
One basic assumption that has to be made at the outset is obvious: it must be
seen as more than the sum total of the individual contributions. For if the periodical under consideration were no more than a vessel holding a mixed variety
of texts, the only meaningful analysis of it would be to draw up an alphabetical
or chronological index of contents (and leave it at that). Meanwhile, a researcher
who focused his entire attention on the biographies of the contributors to the
periodical or the historical events that were reflected in its pages would not
really be studying his purported object but the factors surrounding it.
In other words: the periodical as such must be conceivable as a symbolic
structure, i.e., a text, in its own right. Such a text is complex and heterogeneous, not least because various discourses (political, historical, and literary)
and media (words, graphic art, and photography) coexist in it. It is multi-authored, dialogical and potentially open-ended, not structured by a predetermined dnouement. It has a specific poetics expressed in the choice, presentation, and composition of its materials. As with any other text, no single
element can be removed and placed in a different environment without
changing its meaning at least slightly. A poem by the writer Frantisek Halas in
the pages of a Czech exile journal like Svedectv (1: 41) means something different from its identical pendant in a present-day edition of Halas collected
works, not only because it is surrounded by different texts as well as picked,
presented and thus tacitly appropriated by different people for different reasons, but also because the form of a periodical, the date printed on page one,
will automatically suggest topical parallels to the political issues of the day.
The study of a cultural journal must always take political, historical, or social
contexts into account, and also bear in mind that the journal is part of a net-
We did not want an migr journal (Neil Stewart)
243
work that may include a large number of other persons, texts, intentions, and
institutions. A close-reading focusing only on the manifest textual material
would therefore be even more inappropriate in the case of this text than in
that of others. That said, there really is no need for the literary critic to bring a
completely different set of analytical tools to bear on the text of a journal. He
does, in fact, often end up asking the same questions as he would in his interpretation of a work of literature, be it fictional or non-fictional, artistic or
functional (notoriously blurred distinctions anyway). It is true that journals
are not, as a rule, organized by the intention of a single author, but authors
and their authority are generally problematic categories. Moreover: are there
not writers of fiction who seem to exercise only minimal control over their
characters writers who will deliberately disappear behind the events related,
not so much telling a story as arranging heterogeneous materials for the
reader to make sense of ? And at the same time, do not some editors exercise
such control over their contributors that every single word printed in their
journals could well be taken to be their own? All this is not to say that the text
of a novel and the text of a journal are the same thing, but that they can be
tackled in similar ways, namely by identifying recurrent themes, analyzing the
principles of composition, identifying intertextual references and real-life
contexts, and ideally by reconstructing an underlying ideological scheme.
What does take on special relevance in the literary study of a periodical,
however, is the much discussed interrelation of inner ideological content and
external form. The poetics of composition, the rhetoric of form, and the
material aspects of communication are rather more palpable here than a literary criticism that deals predominantly in ideas would acknowledge. The literary historian discussing the moral philosophy behind Dostoevskys Crime
and Punishment usually has little attention to spare for the original layout of the
text or the way it was first serialized in Mikhail Katkovs bimonthly Russkii
vestnik (Russian Messenger). Conversely, if a scholarly study of that journal
dwelt in great detail on the psychology of Raskolnikov, its author would certainly seem to have missed his point. Ideally, the analysis of a periodical
should try to establish its most important socio-historical contexts as well as
its basic ideological program, and then examine how these determine its semiotics and various concrete publishing practices.
I shall attempt to examine in this way the Czech cultural quarterly Svedectv
(Testimony), which was published between 1956 and 1992 in (successively)
New York, Paris, and Prague. The decisive socio-historical context for Svedectv was beyond doubt the situation of exile, while its ideological program
was exemplified by the life and work of its chief editor Pavel Tigrid, and more
specifically by his theory of gradualism.
244
1. Biography
Pavel Tigrid was born in 1917 as Pavel Schnfeld, the son of a chemical engineer from northern Bohemia. His parents, who were non-believing Jews
fully assimilated into Czech society, had him christened a Roman Catholic. Tigrid studied law in Prague, but when the German forces occupied the country
he and a friend decided to flee abroad:
I was standing on Wenceslas Square with Pepk Schwarz-Cervinka on March 15, 1939, a
terribly bleak, rainy day, and the Wehrmacht boys in black were driving all around us on
their motorbikes. It was then that I spoke and I must commend myself here the allbut-legendary sentence: Well, Pepk, this is not for us. We obtained exit visas under a
false pretense [], got on a train and went to Germany. It was all extremely hazardous
and boyishly nave, but we did get to Belgium. We could have gone to France but wanted
to move on to England, because we considered it a solid country and because we spoke
reasonably good English. (Pecinka/Tigrid 145)
Schnfeld spent the war years in London, working first as a waiter, then as an
announcer for the Czech-language service of the BBC, and finally as editor of
the Czechoslovak exile governments regular radio program. It was for this
job that Pavel adopted his pseudonym, explaining later that in school he always used to name the River Tigris incorrectly as Tigrid. He also revealed
that his boss, Minister Hubert Ripka, had advised him to choose a radio name
that would not betray his Jewish origins (Tigrid, Kapesn pruvodce 191).
In June 1945, Tigrid returned to Bohemia on a British military plane, to discover that almost all his family had been murdered by the Nazis. Only one
stepsister survived, who had fled to the United States (Postov 8). Tigrid was
offered a job with the Czech national broadcasting corporation by the Minister of Information, the hard-line communist Vclav Kopecky, who had
himself just come back from exile in Moscow. When Tigrid showed up, however, he was told that the invitation had been a mistake and was meant for
someone else (Pecinka/Tigrid 10). He found employment at the English department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and later became chief editor,
first of the weekly Obzory (Horizons), the organ of the conservative Christian
Democrats, and later of Vyvoj (Development), a journal belonging to the same
party.
When the communists seized power in February 1948, Tigrid had just departed for a journalistic tour of the British-controlled sector of Germany
and not a minute too soon: The state security issued an arrest warrant for
me, but they got to the border only about half an hour after I had crossed it
(Pecinka/Tigrid 14). In all accounts of how his second exile came about, Tigrid takes care to point out that in spite of certain forebodings the coup dtat
245
took him by surprise and that his political friends had actively encouraged him
to travel abroad and to disregard his scruples about leaving home in such difficult times. Later, the Czech exile community would repeatedly accuse him of
having known all along that a putsch was imminent and of having been coward enough to leave the sinking ship without warning anyone (Tigrid, Kapesn
pruvodce 247). He did leave his wife behind, whom he had married in 1947 and
who was held in custody by the regime. In September 1948 she was somehow
smuggled out with the help of some good people (Tigrid 2000, 2467),
the Brits (Pecinka/Tigrid 14). His first book Ozbrojen mr (Peace in Arms),
however, could not be saved: the authorities had the ready printed and bound
copies confiscated and destroyed before publication (Kovtun 22). Asked to
compare his two exiles, he later explained:
In 1939 there was no doubt, the enemy was clear to everyone, and during all that time in
London no-one ever questioned who that enemy was. After 1948 there was always some
but in the air. The enemy was not unanimously defined and it took a long time for the
Czech people and us expatriates to begin to see matters as they really were. The persecutions, after all, went relatively slowly at first. Then came the fifties and everything became clear, at least to us anticommunists. (Pecinka/Tigrid 145)
During the four years following 1948, Tigrid lived and worked in Germany
and was instrumental in setting up the Czechoslovak section of Radio Free Europe in Munich, ostensibly unaware of the fact that it was financed by the CIA
(Pecinka/Tigrid 16). He was director of the program until 1952, when he resigned from his post in circumstances which are not quite clear: it seems he
had fallen out with an eminent fellow exile, the journalist and writer Ferdinand Peroutka. Tigrid himself tends to be evasive about this episode of his biography, speaking on one occasion of purely technical reasons for his demission (Lederer/Tigrid 13), and on another giving the following saucy if not
totally convincing historical anecdote:
I employed a secretary at Radio Free Europe. On my wifes advice, I had taken on a somewhat older Sudeten-German rather than a beautiful young woman. Now, this lady got
picked up by an employee who was a Slovak separatist. At this time we were expecting a
delegation of Slovak politicians from Canada, who were to come and look at how their
countrymen were getting on with that old Czech (Cechn) Tigrid at Radio Free Europe.
Shortly before, I had composed a letter to my boss, something to this effect: Dear Bill,
the Slovaks are coming. I think I can manage them, but I have only ninety dollars per
month for representation. If you would double that I could feed them properly and
everything would be alright. I dictated that letter to her, she gave it to her Slovak, and he
immediately sent it on to the Canadian newspapers. That proved fatal. (Pecinka/Tigrid 17)
Tigrid moved to New York, thinking somehow that America was waiting for
me but soon discovering that it was not (Lederer/Tigrid 13). He enrolled
246
at Columbia University as a student of Political Science and occasionally

wrote commentaries for The Voice of America (Postov 10), but media institutions in the US would not employ him permanently, because he was now said
to get on badly with minorities. And in the States that formulation was as
good as a death sentence (Pecinka/Tigrid 17). In July 1955, a secret service
informer using the code name Marie reported to Prague: Tigrid is desperate; he cannot find a job, and his wife is expecting their second child in January. At present he is working as a waiter, but only on the weeckends [sic!]
(qtd. in Zdek Tajemn svedectv and Postov 19). Tigrid claims to have
had the idea for Svedectv while on night shift at an Irish pub in Brooklyn (Lederer/Tigrid 11). He founded the quarterly in 1956 together with ten other
exiles: Vilm Brzord, Jan Cep, Jir Hork, Josef Jons, Jir Krnet, Jan Kolr,
Emil Kovtun, Radomr Luza, Mojmr Povolny, and Emil Ransdorf. When he
moved to Paris four years later as the European representative of a New York
publishing house, Svedectv settled with him in the French capital for the next
three decades.
As his journal grew into a central institution of Czech, Slovak, and European migr culture, so did the indefatigable Pavel Tigrid become a major figure on the international stage, not only as an editor and prolific political journalist (who has been translated into English, French, German, Italian,
Portuguese, and Russian) but also as longtime president of the PEN Club of
Writers in Exile. Meanwhile, his popularity with the regime in the CSSR was of
a rather different nature: Tigrid was stripped of his Czechoslovak citizenship
in 1959 and after the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968 at times enjoyed notoriety as public enemy number one.
After the Velvet Revolution, Tigrid became an advisor to the new president
Vclav Havel, another former dissident writer now making a career in politics.
From 1994 to 1996, he was Czech Minister of Culture, albeit a fairly controversial one (see Culik) on account of his drastic cuts of state subsidies. At the
end of his term in office by then he was nearly eighty Tigrid even regretted
that he had not been able to abolish his own post, and the entire ministry with
it. During his last years, he lived alternately in Prague and Paris, devoting himself to fostering Czech-German dialogue and to bringing about a reconciliation of the two countries. He also starred in a 2003 TV documentary called
Pavel Tigrid Evropan (Pavel Tigrid, the European) by Helena Trestkov. In
this film, Tigrids bad health is clearly evident. He died in Paris later in the
same year. Some sources suggest that he killed himself: Having achieved all
he could in a lifetime, he quietly closed the book, and went (Halada).
247
2. Pavel Tigrid: the Writer

Over the years, apart from his contributions to Svedectv, Tigrid produced several monographs. These writings must be seen as closely connected with his
journal, not only because some were serialized in it before coming out in book
form, but also because they are written in a similar style and concerned with
similar topics as Tigrids periodical work. According to his colleague and lifelong friend Jir Kovtun, the publication of each monograph was also indicative of a new stage in the development of Svedectv (19). Thematically, these
books deal mostly with the political history of the Czechoslovak state since
the mid nineteen thirties.
Kovtun finds it impossible to assign Tigrids writings to any traditional
genre (22), although they may quite fittingly be described as lengthy essays.
The authors main interest is always predominantly political-historical (as opposed to literary-artistic), but from time to time he also includes anecdotes,
wayward associations, and elements of fiction. Tigrids book Marx na Hradcanech (Marx on the Hradcin), published in 1960, has been called two books in
one (Kovtun 22), combining as it does an analysis of the first twelve years of
communist rule in the CSSR with autobiographical reminiscences about life in
exile. Twenty-eight years later, he chose to present his favorite subject in yet
another unusual format: Kapesn pruvodce inteligentn zeny po vlastnm osudu (The
Intelligent Womans Pocket Guide to Her Own Fate), the title of which echoes
G.B. Shaws The Intelligent Womans Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1928). This
text has a narrative frame in which Mr. Tigrid, an elderly migr journalist
and historian, meets Lucie, a young woman from Prague, at a seaside resort
and lectures her on Czechoslovak history in the course of thirteen successive
evenings. At the end of each chapter, Lucie, who is considering emigration and
wants to know how the current malaise of her home country came about, is
provided with a list of recommendations for further reading. Kapesn pruvodce
cannot be called a masterpiece of narrative fiction, although it has an ironic
twist or two (Lucie falls asleep several times and on one occasion insists that
the meeting be transferred to the local discotheque). It does, however, provide
a good example of Tigrids acute awareness of the target group, his efforts to
address himself to a certain, clearly defined audience in this case the young
generation that had grown up in the CSSR without any personal memories of
the Prague Spring and to adapt his discourse accordingly. Such a rhetorical
mode was also highly characteristic of Svedectv. A typically conservative
Czech emigrant, wrote Jan Culk after the authors death, would have dismissed this Lucie as a degenerated product of the communist system and
refused even to talk to her. But Tigrid was always ready for dialogue.
248
Given the fact that his subject matter is a historical rcit structured by three
catastrophic events the German invasion (1938), the communist takeover
(1948), and the Soviet intervention (1968) , Tigrid is on the whole a remarkably optimistic writer. Although he tends to be skeptical about romantic idealism in politics, no good cause ever seems quite lost to him and no negative
state of affairs totally irreversible. Steeped in the tradition of democratic humanism represented by the First Czechoslovak Republic and its president
T.G. Masaryk, as well as impressed by his wartime experience of the English
parliamentary system (Kapesn pruvodce 191), he continuously refers his readers
to the ideals of individual freedom, freedom of opinion, and democratic pluralism. Dialogue a dialogue from which no-one may be excluded , is almost
a panacea for Tigrid. The three traumata of Czechoslovak history mentioned
above, for example, he conceives of as a threefold repetition of the same
archetypal situation, in which the side under attack has certain moral advantages that are practically useless, whereas the attacker has a very practical advantage in military strength. Such a situation, Tigrid argues, can only be
mastered by constant attempts on the part of the weaker to make their moral
capital count with others, including the oppressors, and thus gradually tip the
power balance in its favor (Kovtun 23). Applied to the situation of Czechoslovakia under communist rule, this meant keeping in contact and working together not only with anti-communist forces in- and outside the country, but
also with representatives of the Party, especially with the various reformist
currents inside it.
3. Exile and Gradualism

In his seminal study, Politick emigrace v atomovm veku (Political Emigration in
the Atomic Age), published in book form in 1968 but containing material that
had been serialized in Svedectv since 1963, Tigrid writes about the second wave
of Czechoslovak emigration (i.e., those who left the country after the communist coup dtat in 1948), analyzing that generations specific intellectual
characteristics, political situation, and possible plans of action. He begins by
disagreeing with recent Marxist attempts to differentiate between the post48ers and the time-honored socialist myth of the revolutionary in exile by theorizing the former as the fundamentally new historical phenomenon of a
reactionary or bourgeois emigration, aggressive in character and intent
on turning back the wheel of historical progress (Kren 167). Tigrid prefers
to label his exiled compatriots democratic migrs, insisting at the same
time that their intention was by no means to reestablish the political system of
249
the First Republic and restore their home country to the status quo ante 1937
(Politick emigrace 53). On the contrary, he says, many democrats who went
abroad in 1948 had undertaken far-reaching social changes immediately after
the war, but been thwarted by the non-cooperating communists. Tigrid also
maintains (Politick emigrace 79) that the reform process that began inside the
Communist Party in the late nineteen fifties and finally led to the Prague
Spring had really been sparked more than a decade earlier by the ideas of
politicians and intellectuals who then became migrs in the wake of February
1948 although his fellow exiles were often unaware of this contingency, or
unwilling to take the credit for it.
Tigrid roundly dismisses the widespread laments inside the migr community about a lack of unity and authoritative organization. What others bemoaned as ideological fragmentation that would weaken Czech exile as a
whole Tigrid celebrated as modern pluralism that attested to its democratic
culture. Unity as a virtue in itself was an outdated legend, very popular with
the dogmatists on either side of the Iron Curtain: Sociologists and historians
will one day be struck by the aggressive and systematic way in which the myth
of unity was drummed into the heads of the people back home by the representatives of the Communist Party, and at the same time preached by their bitterest adversaries to their own followers in exile (Politick emigrace 8485). In
an age in which the existence of atomic weapons in the East as well as in the
West had rendered a complete military victory of one side over the other impossible, the uncompromising ideological attitudes of old had become obsolete. Tigrid cites the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, according to which the atomic bomb is classless it destroys everyone. The
present-day exile could no longer hope to ride back into his hometown victorious on a white horse or a flower-strewn tank, but had to temper his ethical idealism with the sobering demands of real politics (Politick emigrace 74).
In other words, he was called upon to do what Svedectv did: keep the dialogue
with the other side going, try to improve relations with the people back home,
and encourage a gradual liberalization of the political system. In the long run,
one could rely on the fact that the fiercest opponent of communism is communism in practice (Politick emigrace 86).
Although the modern exile thus cut a somewhat less heroic figure than his
romantic predecessors, he did not have to suffer their tragic isolation and
sheer impotence, because his situation provided many opportunities for
meaningful action. Modern means of communication and travel, a host of international meetings, congresses, festivals, and stipends facilitated his activity
(Politick emigrace 9091). What is more, many representatives of the
post-1948 Czechoslovak emigration were particularly well qualified for their
250
role in political exile. They had occupied important posts in the Czech Republic, were well educated, often relatively young, and it had not taken them
long to attain respectable positions as journalists, scientists, professors, businessmen, etc., in the countries they now lived in. While such blending into
foreign societies was decried and lamented as cultural estrangement by many
conservatively-minded migr representatives, Tigrid (Politick emigrace
9192) characteristically stresses the positives of having such a well-to-do network in place and since his own journal depended in no small measure on
private donations from his compatriots we may assume that he knew what he
was talking about.
When Politick emigrace was published Tigrids preface is dated February
1968 things were indeed looking bright for him. The Party had just replaced the hard-line communist Antonn Novotny with Alexander Dubcek as
Secretary General, and it seemed that the faith Tigrid had placed in the reform
communists had been justified. In the first half of the same year he wrote a
study entitled Le Printemps de Prague (The Prague Spring) for the Paris publishing house Seuil, explaining the developments in the CSSR to a French audience. This book a tremendous commercial success (Pecinka/Tigrid 22) is
basically a collage of original documents with short comments by the author.
As such, it is fairly typical of Tigrids writing (Politick emigrace opens in similar
fashion with a thirty-page anthology of topical quotations), and it also resembles the style of Svedectv, where the presentation of sources is often given
priority over explicit interpretation. Reality, however, got ahead of Le Printemps. The book relates the unfolding of events up to August 3, praising in the
closing remarks the Czech reformers for their remarkable performance and
fine tactical abilities in bringing about a historic and irreversible decolonization of the Stalinist empire (275). Tigrid little thought at this point that
just over two weeks later the Soviets would crush the Prague Spring under the
accumulated weight of six thousand tanks.
Tigrids disappointment and the way it influenced his views are borne out
by the title of his next book, published in 1969: La Chute irrsistible dAlexander
Dubcek (literally: The Unavoidable Fall of Alexander Dubcek, but translated
into English as: Why Dubcek Fell). This study is remarkable above all for the
highly confidential background materials presented by Tigrid, including detailed minutes of secret meetings of the Partys Central Committee. President
Novotny reportedly had hysterical fits whenever the exiles name was mentioned, supposing himself surrounded by Tigrids agents ( Jezdinsky 106).
Actually, there seems to have been only one regular informer, whose identity
remains unknown to this day. Three years before his death, Tigrid said this
much: This man worked for [the Prague studio] Krtky film. He was a Party
251
member but did not like the regime for various reasons. In the sixties, he attended Central Committee sessions with Oldrich Svestka, who was in charge
of media and communication. He also traveled to Paris relatively regularly and
brought me certain manuscripts. He was the source the only one of its kind.
Our meetings carried on into the seventies but then petered out. He was a
close-lipped man whom I never suspected of playing a double game. He was
always discreet, loved France and Paris, and also liked Svedectv a truly remarkable figure (Pecinka/Tigrid 15). Tigrids wife Ivana has also credited
Heda Kovlyov, the widow of a prominent Party official executed after a
show trial in 1952, with having procured explosive political documents for
her husbands publications (Bendov/Tigridov).
Before closing our present overview, we should add that La Chute dAlexander Dubcek merits a mention for another reason. In this book the author
apparently to the slight irritation of two of his colleagues from Svedectv (cf.
Kovtun 27 and Jezdinsky 111) makes one major if implicit correction to the
gradualist theory elaborated in Politick emigrace: communism and democratization are now seen as ultimately incompatible. Even if the Soviets had not
intervened, he argues, the experiment of Dubcek, that sentimental Marxist
(cf. Svedectv 10: 109), would have failed. He would either have had to allow free
elections and renounce the single party system for good, or stop the liberalization process and embark on a rigid course of normalization similar to
that of the hardliners who succeeded him (194209).
When the Czech and Slovak intellectual supporters of the Prague Spring
were forced into emigration, they were as communists not welcomed by large
parts of the conservative exile establishment. Tigrids reaction was also somewhat ambivalent: he greeted the newcomers with an article called Salva do
prtel (A Salute Fired at Friends) in Svedectv (12: 188191), reminding them
that as Party members they had brought harm to more than one generation
in the CSSR since 1948 (188) and that at the time he and his contemporaries
were threatened none of them had budged an inch []. Now they are calling
persecution what they called class struggle then (190). However, to the final
question How to go on? he replied As before and called in good gradualist tradition for pragmatic, long-term cooperation, regardless of ideological
differences (191). Unlike most exile institutions that had existed before 1968,
Svedectv proceeded to work productively together with the August emigrants
and their most important periodical, the Rome-based bimonthly Listy (Pages).
Tigrid and its editor Jir Pelikn sometimes even arranged joint transport for
their journals to Czechoslovakia (Pecinka/Tigrid 212).
252
4. Svedectv : Poetics, Composition, and

Historical Development
The founding issue of Svedectv was published in New York, during the height
of the Hungarian uprising, just days before the Soviet intervention put an end
to the hopes and expectations raised by the revolt. Svedectv no. 1, dated October 28, 1956, opened with the following programmatic announcement:
Appeal: This journal comes out at the time of a revolution in Central Europe. It is a revolution that is singular in its way: directed not against socialism, but against the Soviet
Union, the country that has corrupted true socialism. This revolution does not aim for a
return of capitalism, but for a return of liberty, justice, and human dignity. It is a fight of
the people against those who for years have humiliated, constricted, tormented, and
fooled it at the behest of a foreign dictator, who has recently been proclaimed a criminal
even in Moscow. The people demand that these men be removed. This Czechoslovak
journal, published abroad, declares its solidarity with the fighting people. What its contributors have been saying for eight long years has now come true: today, together with
all staunch Czechoslovaks at home, we must create the main precondition for a life in
freedom: full independence from Soviet Russia. A number of leading communist representatives in Central and South-Eastern Europe have already voiced this claim, and the
Soviet government will sooner or later have to give in to it. All communists who still
want to call themselves Czechoslovaks in the future must support this claim and insist
on its complete fulfillment. In doing so, they can count on the support of the entire
people. After this has happened, we shall open the discussion on what comes next. This
journal wants to serve the discussion in full awareness of the moral, intellectual, and
political concord that exists between the young generation back home and those who, as
democrats, had to leave their country in 1948. Near the end of the fateful year 1956 they
thus testify (podvaj svedectv) to the fact that with their feelings and their thoughts
they are standing more passionately than ever on the side of the people and its yearnings.
With this journal, which they are sending home, they appeal to all true Czechoslovaks to
join in the quest for a future in peace, liberty, and justice. (Svedectv 1: 1)
The optimism underlying this declaration was considerably subdued in later

numbers, following the Budapest events of November 1956. All the same,
several traits that would characterize the text of Svedectv as it evolved over
three decades are already observable in its first lines. The final sentence refers
to a basic principle that set this medium quite apart from other exile periodicals. It was not aimed at the Czech community abroad to preserve and
strengthen its cultural identity We did not want an migr journal, said the
chief editor later (Pecinka/Tigrid 18) , but addressed itself mainly to readers
back home. Svedectv was intended to be circulated in the CSSR and became an
influential factor in the countrys interior politics, especially during the
build-up to the Prague Spring. Domestic contributions (mostly letters and samizdat texts, but also articles from official sources) always constituted a sub-
253
stantial share of its content, and even staunch adherents of the Party made occasional tactical use of this illegal platform, where otherwise unprintable
opinions could be communicated. Svedectv adapted its activity with sometimes
ruthless flexibility to the political needs of the day, most noticeably so in 1968,
when the editors skipped three issues (3436) in order to deprive Party hardliners in Prague of a propaganda target during a critical phase of the reform
process (cf. Svedectv 12: 188).
The pragmatism of Svedectv is well illustrated by the calculated rhetoric of
the text quoted above. At first glance, one would hardly suspect that anyone
of Tigrids center-right political persuasion could be behind the apostrophe to
true socialism or the explicit approval of Central and South-East European
(i.e., Polish, Hungarian, and Yugoslav) reform communism. The authors of
the Appeal have no qualms about referring simultaneously to socialist concepts (with their internationalist implications) and to their readers patriotic
feelings, in an apparent effort to draw in as many people as possible, rather
than worrying about abstract logic or ideological consistency. Attracting attention and making contact is their first priority.
Unsurprisingly, this eclectic stance came under severe criticism from different sides. Radomr Luza (359) recalls how he, Hork, and Jons, all three of
them Social Democrats, were ostracized by their party, while the communist
regime at home strongly objected to Svedectvs usurpation of Marxist terminology for the purpose of ideological diversion (cf. Svedectv 8: 433). The
strictly anti-communist exile establishment also accused the journal and those
associated with it of a dangerous lack of principles. This conflict was widely
interpreted at the time (among others, by the Secret Service in Prague, cf.
Postov 21) as one between two Czechoslovak migr generations: the older
expatriates around Ferdinand Peroutka opposed Tigrid and his followers,
most of whom were then in their early thirties. However, the ideological rift
also divided the Svedectv group itself. The journals early numbers contain not
only several contributions harshly criticizing the concept of gradualism (1:
118, 140, 5: 7071), as well as a note of protest from the Council of Free Czechoslovakia in New York (5: 69), but also an open letter from Jan Kolr, a
founding member of Svedectv, explaining that he considered its agenda immoral and opportunistic and therefore felt obliged to resign from his position as coeditor (Svedectv 1: 11215). Emil Ransdorf left for similar reasons
and was temporarily followed in 1961 by Jir Hork.
According to Kovtun (qtd. in Zdek Tajemn svedectv), not everybody
realized in the mid nineteen fifties that gradualism was the first step to victory over communist totalitarianism, and that Svedectv actually had a theoretically coherent ideology of its own. If we keep in mind the importance of the
254
First Czechoslovak Republic as a historical model in Tigrids political

thought, the quoted references to all true or all staunch Czechoslovaks
acquire a specific semantic value: Svedectv is casting itself here not in the role
of an anti-communist, anti-Russian or exile institution, but of a Czechoslovak
one. This is used here as a signifier denoting, as it were, democratic humanism in the tradition of Masaryk rather than as a conventionally nationalist distinction. Dating the first issue October 28 the anniversary of the
founding of Czechoslovakia in 1918 was a consciously symbolic act, and the
second moment defining the lifespan of Svedectv is similarly significant: the
journal closed down not with the end of communism in 1989, but in 1992,
when the federal state of Czechs and Slovaks broke up. Tigrid explicitly devoted the last number to nationalism, the modern drug, declaring that the
political split marked the beginning of a new era, in which his review had finally lost its raison dtre (25: 161).
During the entire course of its existence, Svedectv demonstratively adhered
to Masaryks democratic ideals, above all the principle of freedom of opinion.
The editors regularly included texts out of line with their own views, such as
regime communiqus, letters from indignant readers cancelling their subscriptions (e.g. Svedectv 4: 215) or a communist ideological analysis of their
journal (8: 41933). In many of these cases they refrained from adding an explicit commentary, limiting themselves to the detached, matter-of-fact presentation of materials implied by the very name Svedectv, which expressed
the basic intention of our periodical: to testify to what was going on in the
heart of Europe rather than moralizing (something exiles are particularly
prone to), propagating, prognosticating, and politicizing (Lederer/Tigrid 12). It is paradoxical, by the way, that this liberal and pluralistic agenda
should have been implemented by a chief editor who managed his business in
austerely autocratic fashion, allegedly reducing the editorial board of Svedectv
to an institution of purely symbolic significance. Tigrid overwhelmed us,
the writer Lubomr Martnek recalls: On first acquaintance he was extremely
pleasant, but when you began working with him you soon realized that this
was no charming bon vivant but an authoritarian character who had his editorial conception and would not let anyone interfere with it (qtd. in Zdek,
Tajemn svedectv). Likewise, the pleasant outward appearance of the journal was strictly and purposefully aligned with Tigrids ideological agenda: Ladislav Sutnar, a Czech exile and pioneer of twentieth-century information design, created an elegant, functional layout to suggest democratic transparency
and rational evenhandedness.
But Svedectv was by no means a passively tolerant or indifferent medium
that would publish any content or accept everyones views. There are many
255
ways of influencing a readers perception of a text without contradicting it directly, and devices to such effect played an important role in the semiotics of
Tigrids periodical. His choice of quotations and, especially, his habit of citing
sources out of context to make them support his own standpoint, were
openly criticized even by close allies (cf. Svedectv 3: 13537), while others had
reason to complain about the tendentious paraphrasing of their work. For
example, an article taken from the official Czech review Plamen (Flame) appears in the exile journal (3: 36738) with the added introduction: The Marxist critic Milan Jungmann, incurably infected with Zhdanovism, has recently
checked the pulse of Czechoslovak prose. The text that follows contains
long extracts from the original essay but also nondiegetic parentheses like
and because as a Marxist [Jungmann] is incapable of speaking independently
of Party dogmas, he laments as follows etc. Finally, at the bottom of the page,
the whole contribution is attributed to Milan Jungmann (Prague)! The resources afforded by the graphical layout are sometimes used to a similar effect, e.g., when short quotations from political speeches, regime statements,
or official radio broadcasts appear in black-framed boxes (reminiscent of
obituary notices) and placed suggestively inside a text with a totally different
ethos.
Svedectv grew considerably in size over the years (in the sixties, an annual
volume had three to four hundred pages, in the eighties the average was almost one thousand) but the basic structure of the individual numbers remained unchanged. Each issue opened with a section that contained short
comments by the editors on recent political and cultural events, followed by
the more substantial studies and essays. The final part, entitled Tribuna Svedectv, was reserved for letters from the readers and provided an arena for discussions and polemics. Regularly updated lists of samizdat publications and
an extensive running bibliography of books on Czechoslovakia maintained by
Ludmila Seflov were important features of the journal.
Svedectv published in Czech and (albeit to a much lesser extent) in Slovak.
Apart from the original contributions, it included extracts or complete texts
taken from official as well as unofficial sources in the CSSR, alongside translated works by foreigners, mostly American, German, and Polish authors. Its
focus was on political, sociological, and historical subjects, especially problems relating directly to East Central Europe. The wider context of world
politics also received attention, whereas goings-on inside the Czechoslovak
exile community were of relatively marginal importance compared to the
space other migr periodicals devoted to them.
The arts, literature, and literary criticism were represented in Svedectv from
the very beginning, and gained in prominence as time went by. In keeping
256
with its general philosophy, the journal concentrated on works of evident

political or social significance. Ren Welleks study Literature and Society was
programmatically serialized over the first four issues (1: 4352, 1305, and
2406), and in the summer of 1964 Svedectv reprinted Karel Teiges anti-Stalinist manifesto Surrealismus proti proudu (Surrealism against the Current)
from 1938 (6: 383386).
The journal published and discussed domestic as well as world literature,
often taking its cues from current events. The famous conference on Franz
Kafka held in Liblice in May 1963 prompted a series of articles and notes (cf.
Svedectv 5: 789, 6: 1134, 289296, 296371), as well as a retrospective
twenty years later (18: 97103, 127136, 137142) that included two chapters
of the novel Der Prozess (The Trial) in Czech translation (6995). Naturally,
there was extensive coverage of the historic 4th Congress of the Czechoslovak
Writers Union in 1967 (cf. 8: 451548), where authors like Milan Kundera,
Ludvk Vaculk and others had spoken out courageously against the regime.
Special features were motivated by international awards like the 1984 Nobel
Prize for Jaroslav Seifert or the 1986 Erasmus Prize for Vclav Havel, by
round birthdays (of Roman Jakobson, Bohumil Hrabal, Jan Kolr, Vclav
Cerny), or by prominent deaths (Vtezslav Nezval, Jan Cep, Ernest Hemingway, Egon Hostovsky, Heinrich Bll). After Jan Werich and Jir Voskovec had
died in the space of nine months (October 1980 and July 1981), Svedectv dedicated a whole number to the duo and its Dadaist art, the so-called Liberated
Theater, from the interwar period (15: 1208).
On many occasions, the journal called attention to Eastern European
writers who were being prosecuted as dissidents. When the Soviet regime
forced Boris Pasternak to decline the Nobel Prize in 1958, Svedectv devoted
several commentaries and studies to him (2: 5561, 62, 27182, 3: 14863,
35765) as well as publishing extracts from Dr. Zhivago (2: 6280) and samples
of Pasternaks poetry (2: 26970, 3: 4344). The Moscow trial against Andrei
Sinyavsky and Yuly Daniel for anti-Soviet activity was covered (Svedectv 7:
4251, 8: 13241), as were the trial of Joseph Brodsky and the case of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose Nobel Prize speech appeared in the journal (11:
60921). Kovtun translated Evgeny Evtushenkos poem Babi Yar for Svedectv (4: 314). During the 1950s and 60s, the works of critical Russian writers,
even those who were not dissidents, functioned as liberating models for Czechoslovak, as well as for Polish, Romanian, and Hungarian literature, because
these authors (e.g., Vladimir Dudintsev or Valentin Ovechkin) offered the
kind of unadorned depictions of life under socialism that their colleagues in
smaller member states of the Warsaw Treaty were not permitted to give. The
satellite regimes sometimes prohibited the publication of certain realist texts
257
from their brother country, arguing that their audiences, unlike readers in the
USSR, were not yet sufficiently mature to be exposed to them (Vladislav 58,
77). Here Svedectv obligingly stood in.
Otherwise, the journal dealt predominantly with the repression of artists in
Czechoslovakia and East Central Europe, reporting on Party campaigns
against unruly culture periodicals like Tvr (Face) in 1966 and Literrn noviny
(Literary Newspaper) in 1968, as well as on the 1967 trial of Jan Benes and
Karel Zmecnk (Svedectv 8: 13437, 54982). Ten years later, Svedectv began
to publish regularly the declarations of Charta 77 and also to give accounts
of rock concerts by the band Plastic People of the Universe, whose harassment by the regime had first brought the Charta into being as a solidarity
movement.
Jan Vladislav (53) has rightly given Tigrids journal credit for helping to
maintain the continuity of Czech culture by preserving the memory of officially forgotten artists, by publishing materials that could not be printed in
the CSSR, and by keeping readers at home informed about international developments that they would not otherwise have heard of. He also complained,
however, that the journal tended to neglect poetry in favor of narrative prose,
that many reviews were overly concerned with politics rather than artistic
values, and that Svedectv had failed to produce from its ranks an authoritative
literary critic, who would endow the journal with a distinct critical profile (71).
While we may grant the first two points, it is important to remember when
considering the third that Vladislavs analysis refers only to the first eight volumes of Svedectv (195667) and that it was only after 1968 that Helena Koskov and the prolific Kovtun took charge of the literary criticism section,
which they continued to dominate for almost twenty-five years.
The history of the journal may be divided into two phases, the watershed
being the Prague Spring and its aftermath. On the one hand, the debates on
gradualism had by then subsided and Svedectv was firmly established. On
the other, disappointment with the failure of Dubceks project lingered, and it
became clear that the political state of affairs was not going to change in the
foreseeable future. In the nineteen seventies and eighties, the review intensified its contacts with dissident circles in Czechoslovakia (until then it had concentrated more on dialogue with reform-oriented Party members): two entire
numbers (15: 409600 and 16: 209408) were edited underground in Prague,
using exclusively domestic contributions, the first (1979) under the direction
of Ludvk Vaculk, Petr Pithart, and Vclav Havel, the second (1980) by Egon
Bondy, Ivan Jirous, and Jir Nemec. Tigrid and his collaborators also began to
explore the cultural constituents of their situation in a theoretically systematic
way, and on a larger scale than before. Individual articles analyzed the rela-
258
tionship between Czech migr culture and German literature (18: 48295),
tried to define the status of Czech culture in the global context (18: 496502),
or attempted a general overview of Czech literature in exile (23: 23452),
while thematic issues were devoted to problems like Electronics and Totalitarianism (19: 1240) or Europe, Russia, and Us (19: 241528). In 1973,
Tigrid sparked off a broad and heated discussion on national character with
his essay Jac jsme, kdyz je zle (What were like when Things are Bad). In
this text (Svedectv 12: 30320), he compared catastrophic events from different phases of his countrys history, arguing admittedly in somewhat sweeping fashion that the Czechoslovak people and its representatives had displayed specific negative tendencies over and over again: they were
small-minded, undignified, opportunistic, subservient to the point of absurdity, and exuberant in success but lethargic in the face of adversity. They totally
lacked perseverance and their proverbial pacifism resulted all too often from
indecision and an unwillingness to fight for their ideals. Tigrid added that his
compatriots could be vindictive and cruel, mentioning the violent excesses
against the German minority after 1945 (31011), but only briefly, stopping
short, that is, from touching on the arguably greatest taboo of postwar Czechoslovak historiography: the expulsion of the Sudeten-Germans.
This taboo was broken five years later, when Jan Mlynrik, a Slovak historian then living in Prague, published under the pseudonym Danubius his
Tzy o vysdlen ceskoslovenskych nemcov (Theses on the Eviction of the
Czechoslovak Germans) in Svedectv (15: 10522). Mlynrik likened the forced
transfer of two and a half million Czechoslovak citizens of German ethnicity (108) and the atrocities committed against them to similar actions in the
USSR under Stalin and to the Nazi persecution of the Jews, speaking of the
final solution of the German question in Czechoslovakia (120). Not only did
he condemn the mass deportation for obvious humanitarian and legal reasons, he also pointed out that it had severely harmed the state culturally, politically, and economically. Particularly devastating was the damage done to its
democratic culture: the people had endorsed the principle of collective guilt,
lost respect for others property, and taken irrational revenge with oriental-Asian brutality (106). Just reestablished, the republic had sullied its moral
integrity and betrayed the humanist ideals of Masaryk, thus squandering what
had traditionally been Czechoslovakias only capital in the relations with its
powerful eastern and western neighbors. The expulsion of the Czechoslovak
Germans is not only their tragedy, it is also ours, concluded Danubius: Its
German aspects we can leave to the Germans. But we need to accept responsibility and come to terms with our guilt in our own interest rather than wait
for the acts of that tragedy to repeat themselves (122).
259
This article triggered a fierce discussion that went on in the pages of Svedectv for several years (cf. 15: 383406, 56598, 78595, 16: 17586, 60722,
83840, 18: 219). As Milan Schulz writes:
This long and extensive exchange of opinions showed that the matter was not, and still is
not, one of purely historical interest. The debaters expressed a variety of significant and
specific attitudes, reflecting the whole spectrum of political reality: there were the dogmatists on the extreme ends of that spectrum, radicals of similar ilk but occupying diametrically opposite positions, and of course those in the center, who as in every democratic culture inclined sometimes in this and sometimes in that direction []. It was
interesting to see how Danubius made patriots at home as well as in exile livid with rage.
There was also a conflict of generations to be heard in the discussion, which sounded in
bitter tones sometimes. (12122)
Mlynrik himself has given an account (Svedectv 19: 685711) of the personal
consequences of his Theses in the CSSR. He was hunted down and identified as Danubius by the police, imprisoned without trial and released after
one year for health reasons. In 1982 he emigrated to Germany with his family.
A few years later, Svedectv was the arena for a debate concerning the work of
Milan Kundera, who had left his country for France in 1975 and by the
mid-1980s was the most successful contemporary Czech author, thanks predominantly to his bestselling novel Nesnesiteln lehkost byt (The Unbearable
Lightness of Being), first published in 1984 in French as Linsoutenable lgret
de ltre. Kundera became the subject of controversy on two occasions and in
two respects: as an essayist propagating a specific conception of Central Europe (19: 33372, 759, and 763) and as a writer of fictional literature (20:
13562, 61433, 965, and 21: 72133). The first of these discussions was
sparked by his polemical article The Tragedy of Central Europe in the New
York Review of Books in April 1984, but really went back to a dispute that had
taken place between Kundera and Vclav Havel in the Czech press fifteen
years earlier, after the Soviet intervention. Acknowledging this contingency,
Svedectv no. 74 began its feature del, nos, nik ? (Lot, Kidnap, Escape ?) by reprinting the older materials: in Cesky del (The Czech Lot),
Kundera had argued in December 1968 that it was the historical fate of the
Czechs as a small people to be sandwiched between and bullied by the German and the Russian empires, but that their highly developed culture, skeptical intellect, and faculty for critical reflection more than compensated for
their military inferiority. In the course of the Prague Spring they had risen
above their traditional timidity, shaken off the legacy of the small mentality
(334) and stepped into the spotlight of world history. The August invasion
had not broken their spirit: the Czechoslovak Autumn was even more momentous than the Czechoslovak Spring and in the long run there was every
260
reason to be optimistic now that the people had finally realized the Czech
potential (337). A month later, Havel had published a scathing critique of
this optimistic analysis. According to him, the Czech lot was nothing but a
self-adulating, pseudo-historical myth, conjured up to evade the real problems of the day. The political realities must not be sugarcoated; they demanded responsible action and the moral courage to stand up for universal
human values rather than nationalist clichs about tiny, unfortunately located, good, and intelligent Czechoslovakia suffering at the hands of its
wicked neighbors (34243). Svedectv included Kunderas indignant reply to
this from 1969 (34449), and then proceeded to give a boxed abstract of his
current essay (35051). The Tragedy of Central Europe developed further
the authors notion of the quintessentially Western identity of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, and Hungary. Although these countries were politically
part of the Soviet Bloc, historically they belonged as Central Europe to the
Latin and Roman Catholic cultural sphere, which Kundera set off sharply
against the Byzantine and Orthodox civilization of Eastern Europe, i.e.,
Russia. Central European culture valued the skeptical individual and traditionally stressed democratic diversity, whereas despotic Russian culture
tended towards centralism, standardization, and imperial expansion, the
least possible variety in the largest possible space. Soviet communism was in
certain respects the fulfillment of Russian history. The East had kidnapped
Central Europe after 1945, thus making it disappear in the eyes of a lamentably ignorant Western world, which saw it as nothing but a province of the
Soviet empire and was unaware of its true cultural profile.
In the discussion that followed in Svedectv (35062) there were original contributions by Milan Simecka, Milan Hauner, and the Hungarian philosopher
Jnos Kis; Franois Bondy and Georges Nivat were quoted from the French
journal Le Dbat. In accordance with the vast majority of intellectuals who
commented on the essay at the time, these authors were very critical of the
sweeping distinctions it contained. While the nostalgia of Czesaw Miosz
about Central Europe was just about bearable, Kundera had gone too far.
His depiction of Russia was particularly one-sided and had racist overtones
(Hauner in Svedectv 35657); it also concealed the fact that there always had
been a strong European current in the Russia of Pasternak, Mandelshtam,
and Akhmatova (Nivat in Svedectv 361). Kunderas Central Europe was idealized to the point of falsification, and, apart from this, its tragedy had not
begun with the advent of the Soviets but with the invasion of the Nazis (Simecka in Svedectv 353, Bondy in Svedectv 361). As Hauner pointed out, Hitler,
not Stalin, was the product of Central European civilization (357). The spiritual Biafra after 1968, added Milan Simecka, was decidedly a homemade af-
261
fair []. And the people who have made life so difficult for my friends and
me over the last fifteen years [] all spoke Czech or Slovak (354). He concluded in the pragmatic vein typical of Svedectv: Anyway, I would not try to
convince the Americans that the East is the radical negation of the West.
Many of them think so anyway []. There is certainly more sense in stressing
Russias European tradition (356).
The feature in Svedectv closes with a samizdat translation of a conversation
between Philip Roth and Milan Kundera (36368) that had originally appeared in The Sunday Times Magazine in May 1984. The novelists are not allowed
the last word, however: this goes to the Czech translator of the interview, the
dissident writer Zdenek Urbnek: Now that my work is completed, I am not
sure whether to offer it for reading. This is total rubbish. Roth should have silenced his partner after the second sentence []. We need not grieve about
some of those who have left (368).
All in all, Kundera does not fare well in this number, perhaps because
Tigrids journal was, so to speak, Havel-territory. The future president was
a regular collaborator and a personal friend of the chief editor (cf. Pecinka/
Tigrid 2224), while Kundera, although he lived in Paris, never wrote anything directly for Svedectv.
A year later, the second controversy began with a samizdat review called
Kunderovsk paradoxy (Kunderas Paradoxes) by Milan Jungmann (Svedectv 20: 13562), the former chief editor of Literrn noviny who had been removed from his post and banned from publishing after the Prague Spring. He
addressed the paradox that Kundera, one of the most popular novelists
abroad, a guru of Western society (135), was so relatively unpopular not
only with the communist regime, but also with the representatives of unofficial culture in the CSSR. Jungmann granted that his author was an exceptionally talented narrator and elegant philosophical causeur, but contended that
he catered too much to the taste of a Western audience. It is precisely this
unbearable lightness of writing that attracts the so-called mass reader to
Kunderas novels he sees in them an ideal kind of philosophical prose that
is accessible to him [with his superficial knowledge] and pleasant reading at
the same time. No obstacles lie in his path [] and his vanity is flattered
(161). A similar calculation was behind the image Kundera presented of himself to the public. In one article, he describes his past literary activity thus:
I was a totally unknown author [when I wrote my first novel]. There were terrible persecutions of Czech intellectuals and Czech culture. Official documents listed me as one of the leaders of the counterrevolution, my books were
prohibited and my name even eliminated from the phone registry. And all this
because of Zert (The Joke) (143). Quite untrue, according to Jungmann. His
262
contemporaries at home were well aware that Kundera was by no means an

unknown author in the sixties; he had been one of the leading intellectuals
in the country ever since he entered Czech literature as a poet who believed
in Marxs vision of a new man and a new society (142). He has created from
his biography a clich for the ignorant foreign reader, and succumbed to the
mentality of an exile who is unable to explain abroad the complexity of the
Czechoslovak developments (14344).
Jungmanns literary analysis focuses on the novel Nesnesiteln lehkost byt. He
notes that Kunderas are not novels in the style of the old masters (161) but
novel-variations, without a closely-knit plot, where the individual protagonists never meet each other but live through their own experiences unconnected to other persons, all oriented towards the same center: the philosophical idea that the novel presents to its reader. Kunderas characters were not
human beings of flesh and blood, they were functions of a developing
theme (13637). This was not a problem in itself but sometimes the reader
received the unpleasant impression of a dazzling performance maliciously
designed to muck around with him. In his last novel, for instance, Kundera
with pseudo-philosophical profundity even ascribes a metaphysical meaning
to shit. Too often his writings resembled a witty charade more than the accomplishment of a keen intellect (13738). The reviewer was also irritated by
the prominence of sexual motifs in Kundera, by his extremely drastic descriptions verging on pornography, and by his obsessive linking of eroticism with
violence (139). I find this, shall we say, unprejudiced attitude completely incomprehensible and can only explain it as a concession to a fashionable trend
in Western literature [] a submission to the terror of fashion (140).
Finally Jungmann, who was himself a declassed academic forced by the regime to make his living as a cleaner, objected to the manner in which Kundera
had his protagonist enjoy a similar situation in Nesnesiteln lehkost, where the
doctor and womanizer Toms has to work as a window cleaner after publishing a critical article; the general support and comfort he receives from his
clients turn his life into one big party, with many erotic conquests along the
way. How happy, how careless, and how euphoric the life of a persecuted intellectual in Bohemia is! fumed the critic: Does he even have the right to
complain about anything, to talk about spiritual or existential pressure (155)?
Jungmann was at least in a position to correct Kundera on one specific fact:
During the normalization years, people of very different professions, journalists, lawyers, vicars, historians, diplomats, technicians, and others became
window cleaners, but not a single doctor. This was no coincidence: an administrative order specifically barred all doctors in our country from leaving their
job (154). The authenticity that Nesnesiteln lehkost assumed by including real-
263
istic elements from Czechoslovak political life for the entertainment of the
foreign reader was a false authenticity (155).
On this occasion, the Svedectv community came out in support of their fellow exile. The following issue contained responses to Jungmann by Kvetoslav
Chvatk, Ivo Bock, Petr Krl, and Josef Skvorecky (20: 61433), correcting
him with regard to his basic literary outlook: it was unacceptable to identify an
authors position with the views of his characters (Bock, in Svedectv 632) and
to ignore Kunderas trademark irony (Krl in Svedectv 630). Modern literary
criticism should neither moralize (Skvorecky in Svedectv 621; Bock in Svedectv
631) nor base its argument on normative claims (Chvatk in Svedectv 616, Bock
in Svedectv 631). A single plot and characters of flesh and blood were typical
only of a certain type of novel, whereas Kundera belonged to a fundamentally
different tradition (Chvatk in Svedectv 61617; Skvorecky in Svedectv 620;
Bock in Svedectv 631). Chvatk (61618) even suggested that Jungmanns insistence on such old-fashioned values indicated that he was still rooted in the
aesthetics of Socialist Realism, while only Skvorecky (620) mentioned in passing that the critics remarks in this respect had been rather more descriptive
than reproachful (cf. also Jungmanns reaction in Svedectv 21: 72225). As to
the sexual explicitness of Kundera, it was by no means a concession to Western literature. Why, did all sensual people leave Czechoslovakia after 1968?
asked Petr Krl (628) and Skvorecky pointed out that eroticism had always
been typical of Kunderas work. The fact that it was endowed with metaphysical connotations favorably distinguished his writings from the mainstream of
contemporary American literature, where sexual intercourse was described
with inflationary frequency but only for its own sake. The last author in the
USA who could compete with Kundera in this field was Arthur Miller. As
Skvorecky saw it, Jungmann, actually quite a perceptive critic, had inadvertently lowered himself to the level of many moralizing Czech migr journalists by flatly dismissing such motifs. If he lived in exile, he would run a mile
away from the company of these people (622).
Apart from the literary aspects of the debate, the opposition between the
exiled intellectuals in Paris, Bremen, and Toronto on one side and the Prague
dissident on the other is very interesting to observe. The former tend to cast
themselves in the role of cosmopolitan men of the world, remarking that
Jungmann had no idea at all about the book market (Chvatk in Svedectv 616)
or had apparently misunderstood several press articles because they were
written for Western readers (Skvorecky in Svedectv 61920). Nor, allegedly,
was he aware that Kundera, far from being a guru of Western society, had
actually been received rather critically at first in Germany (Chvatk in Svedectv
615) and the United States (Skvorecky in Svedectv 619). At present, however, it
264
was almost exclusively thanks to him that the world took any notice at all of
Czechoslovakia (Chvatk in Svedectv 618), something the likes of Jungmann
failed to realize. Is it not typical of us that once we have a world-famous
author we immediately go about telling everyone that he does not deserve his
fame? wrote Petr Krl, arguing that traditional small-minded Czech provincialism was still alive behind the Iron Curtain: Kunderas main problem is
that he is not [] a martyr, a new Hus or at least a new Havlcek [], but plays
the role of a nonchalant hedonist (62627). While Chvatk (614) and Skvorecky (624) referred in general terms to the adage that the prophet has no
honor in his own country, Krl was more specific in his criticism and protested sharply against the way in which the dissidents monopolized the claim
to authenticity at home as well as abroad: Jungmann speaks not only as an
independent critic, but also as an avenger, a representative of that parallel
power that the Charta has become in contemporary Czech culture (627).
Skvorecky (commenting on Kunderas false authenticity) struck a more
placatory note: Do we not hear two truly Czech voices, one sounding from
our homeland and one from all corners of the world [], voices that in spite
of their different timbres sound in harmony? The voice of the Czech samizdat, saturated with the immediacy of experience, and the voice of Czech exile,
in which the realities of home, removed in time and space, are naturally transformed into metaphors and likenesses (625)? This was a valiant attempt to
relate exile and domestic opposition to each other and to reconcile a partnership of such vital importance for Svedectv.
5. Svedectv : Finances and Logistics

It is difficult to say anything concrete about the finances of the journal because the chief editor, who was in sole charge of all monetary matters, remained extremely reluctant all his life to talk about the subject. Communist
propaganda always insisted, of course, that Svedectv was sponsored by the CIA
(e.g., Bednr, Posledni role 68), a claim that should perhaps not be dismissed out
of hand, given the generally close contacts many of its protagonists maintained with CIA-financed Radio Free Europe.
The journalist Martin Danes recollects that while he was writing his French
diploma thesis on Svedectv in the nineteen eighties, Tigrid at first encouraged
and supported him, and even offered to publish parts of the study. But then
my supervisor insisted that I include a chapter on the economic background
of the periodical and when I came with that to Mr. Tigrid, he threw me out
and there was no longer any talk of publishing my work (qtd. in Zdek Ta-
265
jemn svedectv). It is very likely that Tigrid, who had been observed by the
Czechoslovak Secret Service for most of his life, took this Czech student in
Paris for a communist informer. Danes would not have been the first such
person to try and get financial information out of him. Just one month before
the first number of Svedectv came out, somebody using the code name Bartos, who had apparently talked to Tigrid about his plans, reported to Prague:
Of the first issue, there are to be around two thousand copies printed and
distributed in the CSSR and eight hundred copies for the Western world.
Printing one issue will cost five hundred dollars, and since it is meant to be a
quarterly, we are talking about two thousand dollars a year, and that sum he
has been guaranteed. The journal will be financed by some rich people in the
USA, whom he does not want to name, but he says it is not at all difficult to
obtain two thousand a year (qtd. in Postov 1718). In view of the vast difference between the figures passed on by Bartos to his Secret Service superiors and the actual, much more moderate print run of Svedectv no. 1, one
gets the impression that in this case the informer may have been deliberately
misinformed.
Tigrid has mentioned that the Slovak Sokol organization in New Jersey and
later Ludovt Sturc, the administrator of the long-established Czech expatriate journal New Yorsk listy (New York Pages; 18741966), helped with the
publication of the first issues by printing them at a very moderate price and
sometimes discreetly forgetting about overdue bills (Lederer/Tigrid 14).
Tigrid credited Jn Papnek, a former Slovak delegate to the United Nations
and not only a generous man, but also one who understood our cause with
having contributed the first donation to Svedectv: on one occasion he said
Papnek gave him five hundred dollars (Lederer/Tigrid 14), later he claimed
to have received a thousand dollars from him (Pecinka/Tigrid 18). Much
more substantial sums, and on a regular basis, were apparently supplied in
later years by the Czech-Canadian industrialist Thomas J. Bata, who ran the
Bata shoe company from the nineteen forties to the nineteen eighties. Tigrid
has hinted at Batas commitment (Kaiser/Tigrid), and Ilja Kunes, who was
member of the Editorial Board between 1985 and 1991, recalls that the shoe
tycoon bought the first computers for Svedectv at fifty thousand francs a
piece and under the condition that no-one should ever talk about it (qtd. in
Zdek Tajemn svedectv).
Tigrid says he envied his Polish counterpart Jerzy Giedroyc, editor of the
monthly Kultura, for the villa and the loads of money at his disposal in Paris
(Pecinka/Tigrid 19). During the twenty-nine years of Svedectv s Parisian operation Tigrid was able to have it printed at a favorable price in the Belgian city
of Bruges, but the journals financial situation was certainly never one of great
266
affluence. The periodical was aimed chiefly at readers in the CSSR, i.e., at
people who could not pay for, let alone subscribe to it. Of the thousand
copies of the first issue a hundred-and-fifty were sent home. The last number
edited in exile in 1989 had a print run of twenty-one thousand, of which fifteen thousand went to Czechoslovakia (Exilov periodika 73). Thus between
ten and seventy percent of the production did not only bring no returns at all,
but even cost money to deliver to their destination a considerable handicap
for any commercial enterprise. Over the years, several editorial notices appeared in Svedectv, asking the readers in France, Germany, and the USA to pay
their subscription fees in time and reminding them also that the samizdat
practice of passing a single copy on from one reader to the next was an excellent idea under a communist regime, but economically harmful for a journal
when adopted by its clientele in the West (3: 180).
The methods by which Svedectv was smuggled through the Iron Curtain
were rather crude to begin with, and must certainly have entailed the loss of
a considerable number of copies: the journal was simply sent by post to
various addresses, including some that had been picked at random from the
telephone registry. Later, Tigrid and his collaborators used more sophisticated strategies, dispatching their mail from constantly changing places or
sending only separate articles as off-prints. Sometimes envelopes containing
copies of Svedectv would be posted in Vienna, giving as addressee a fictitious
person in Hungary and as sender a real person in Czechoslovakia, to whom
the Czech post would then duly return the parcel. The external appearance of Svedectv was systematically varied, e.g., some issues have no title on
the cover, and several copies were printed in pocket-size (15 10 cm) as
well as in the regular format (23 15 cm). Smaller brochures were not only
more difficult to detect in the mail, but also more easily concealed, carried
around, and distributed underhand. Svedectvs pronounced tendency towards
self-anthologization can be explained in similar terms. The editors were
in the habit of extensively quoting and reprinting texts that had already
been published years before (e.g., Svedectv 50: 27394 and 89/90) and of
regularly bringing out separate anthologies of its previous contents (for the
bibliographical details see Exilov periodika 75, 77). In addition, texts that
had originally been serialized in the journal were often re-used for the
eponymous book series (Zach 43). Such publication practices were neither
economically motivated attempts to sell old wine in new bottles, nor a sign
that Svedectv was short of fresh contributions. Rather, since one could never
be sure which materials had reached a given reader, reprinting important
texts several times was a way of maximizing their chances of making it
through.
267
In the seventies and eighties, specially prepared vans were used to transport
Svedectv into the CSSR (see Bednr, Posledn role 76 for a photograph of such a
van confiscated by the police), and Western officials sometimes helped to
smuggle it in: Ivana Tigridov mentions several German diplomats and
the wife of a Danish envoy to Prague. She also explicitly names the sociologist Jirina Siklov, the philosopher and future prime minister Petr Pithart,
and the poet Jan Vladislav as collaborators helping to circulate Svedectv in
Bohemia (see Bendov/Tigridov). Jan Culk points out the logistic contribution of Jan Kavan, founder of the London-based Palach Press agency, and
later Czech foreign secretary and deputy prime minister.
Some people became an active part of the network even against their
wishes, as the journalist Slva Volny remembers:
I had a colleague whose husband was a high-ranking Party official. We were to go and do
some reportage together and I came for her to their flat. While she was getting ready,
I walked about the living room and found some kind of brochure lying there. I picked it
up and began reading it. It contained background information about the last plenary
meeting of the Party. It was extremely interesting and I said to myself: These Party pobaahs (ty stranicky zvrata) always have better information than we do. I wonder who
writes it for them. My colleague entered the room, saw the brochure in my hands,
turned pale and tried to snatch it from me. I held on to it and then saw that it was Svedectv,
published in Paris. I am afraid I allowed myself a little blackmail at this point, because
I said to her: You know what? You are going to leave this Svedectv to me and pass it on to
me in future, otherwise I will report you. She accepted the compromise, and from then
on I regularly received Svedectv. (qtd. in Lederer 15051)
Czechoslovak writers, diplomats, or journalists traveling to Western Europe,

Scandinavia, or the United States were often approached and given the journal to read. Josef Skvorecky recalls how he met Tigrid at a conference of the
PEN Club in Oslo in 1962 and received from him a broad selection of copies
from various years. These were eagerly studied on the car journey back (a
friend did the driving), but Skvorecky dared not take them along on the ferryboat ride to East Germany, and so he had to leave them with a bleeding heart
behind some shed at the landing dock in Denmark (Skvorecky 169). Ivo
Fleischman, who was cultural attach in Paris at the time, reported to Prague
on March 25, 1966: Tigrid is feigning friendliness, but he certainly has ulterior motives. He knows exactly when any of our cultural workers is coming
to France. And no sooner has he arrived than he finds a number of Svedectv in
his hotel room (qtd. in Zdek Tajemn svedectv). Just three years later,
Fleischman himself had emigrated and was writing for Svedectv (45: 4960).
268
6. The Empire Writes Back

Svedectv and the communist regime in Czechoslovakia may have been opposed to one another, but as systems and networks they were closely interlinked: both sides were well informed about their antagonist, very much affected by its presence and heavily influenced by its development. Each
understood the others aims and strategies remarkably well.
The journalist Karel Jezdinsky has pointed out the schizophrenia underlying Pragues attempts to deal with Svedectv (101102): on the one hand, the
authorities would play down its importance, insisting that the impact such a
journal could have in the CSSR was minimal at best (qtd. in Svedectv 8: 432),
that its attacks were completely off-target and its ideology had long been consigned to the scrap heap of history. On the other, the figure of Tigrid was
blown up to demonic proportions whenever it seemed expedient to present
to the public the image of a sly and dangerous enemy, and panicky administrative and police measures were taken to counteract his influence. Three
separate if overlapping areas of regime activity against Svedectv can be distinguished: intelligence operations, scientific analysis, and popular propaganda.
As an influential political journalist of conservative repute, Tigrid had been
under close observation by the Czech communists long before the coup dtat
of February 1948 (Postov 19), and their attention did not lessen when he
went into exile. The Czechoslovak Ministry of the Interior kept a voluminous
file on Tigrid that contained the reports of pseudonymous informers in Germany, the USA, and France under such aliases as Leon, Drek, Strycek
Bycek (Uncle Bull) or 40. To this day, these materials from more than four
decades represent the most extensive source of information on Svedectv (all
the more so because the journals own archives are almost entirely lost). According to his wife, Tigrid generally treated the perpetual surveillance of himself and his personal environment with proud disdain (Bendov/Tigridov),
but one suspects that it could not always be ignored, not, for instance, when
the Paris premises were vandalized and a stink bomb was planted at the editorial office (Zdek Tajemn svedectv). On one occasion, an observer of
the journals headquarters apparently thought he had been detected and
hastily drove off, nearly running over Tigrids fourteen-year-old son. In 1981,
the telephone in his study was tapped and some private conversations recorded, a collage of which was then broadcast by Radio Prague. This caused a
minor diplomatic scandal, in the course of which President Mitterrand called
in the Czechoslovak ambassador to protest against bugging operations in his
country. Shortly afterwards, Svedectv had to move house in Paris, because its
landlord had read about the affair in the French press and gained the impres-
269
sion that his tenants were terrorists of some sort. It was at the new headquarters at Rue Croix des Petits Champs in the 1st arrondissement that a commemorative plaque to the journal was unveiled in April 2007.
Tigrid (Na prazsk jaro) has hinted that if he should one day reveal the
names of everyone who secretly cooperated with Svedectv (which he never did)
the result would be a pretty unbelievable list. Immediately after 1989, however, he and his wife were shocked to discover how many people whom they
had trusted one hundred per cent had for many years been reporting about
them to Prague in an assiduous and stupid fashion (Bendov/Tigridov).
The file at the Ministry of the Interior contains their family photographs, a detailed description of Svedectvs editorial office, and a floor plan of the premises
(reproduced in Postov 3443).
We have seen how acutely aware Tigrid and his collaborators were of their
target group, how they addressed themselves specifically to certain types of
readers. Conversely, the Czechoslovak Secret Service knew quite well how to
approach him. Agents were usually told to play the role of open-minded communists, seeking an informal exchange of ideas. The following instructions
were sent in June 1956 to Bartos in New York:
You will arrange to meet him and open the conversation by saying that his political
thoughts are very interesting and very different indeed from the uninspiring attitudes hitherto taken by the official emigration. You will flatter his person and his qualities. Make
it clear [] that you have entertained similar thoughts yourself [], that this could be
the beginning of a new era of migr activity, the beginning of further and far-reaching
action. You would be very glad if he, a man standing at the fore of this new movement,
would inform you about what he intended to do next. Make it clear that you are talking to
him on a purely private basis.
When the news got around that the publication of a new journal was imminent, the orders for Bartos became more specific:
What are his aims? How does he want to achieve them? Who is behind all this, how numerous is his group, and who is in it? Is he at all the representative of a group or does he
speak only for himself ? On what issues does he disagree with Peroutka? [] Who does
he want to send his journal to (names!) and by what means? What will the content of this
journal be and how will it attempt to cooperate with intellectuals back home? How does
he conceive of that? (qtd. in Postov 20, 22).
It is interesting that during the early days, i.e., before Svedectv came out for the
first time, there were apparently plans to recruit Tigrid as an agent for the
Czech Secret Service and thus make active use of his periodical rather than
obstruct it. After all, he openly propagated coexistence and courageously opposed the strictly anti-communist course of other Czech emigrants as well as
of the US government. Bartos wrote in his communication of October 3,
270
1956: I recommend that we continue negotiating with Leon about support

for his journal and actually pass on a few numbers to members of our Party,
who will certainly welcome such materials for study (qtd. in Zdek Tajemn
svedectv). However, he seems to have failed to convince his superiors: a
copy of his letter in Prague is covered with handwritten notes like Nonsense! or I disagree and Bartos is not acting in accordance with his
orders! One marginal comment reads It is obvious at first glance that this is
a politically dangerous journal, the impact of which could well be much
greater than the flyers and broadcasts of Radio Free Europe. The last conversation between Tigrid and Bartos took place on November 5, 1956, just
after the Soviet army had invaded Hungary. Two days later, Bartos wired
home: My final meeting with Leon has shown him to be a sworn enemy of
communism. This, roughly, is what he said: The events in Hungary prove that
the people in the Peoples Republic hate the communists and the USSR, and
that there can be no negotiating with communists. The people praise those
who murder communists and Secret Service agents because they are occupation forces just as the Germans were (qtd. in Postov 2324). The idea to
rope in Tigrid as an informant was duly dropped. During the years that followed, the extensive Secret Service correspondence concerning him generally
dwelt more on how his activities could be countered and how he might be
brought back to the CSSR and held accountable for his deeds (qtd. in Postov 26). When Tigrid, now officially charged with treason, traveled to a meeting of the PEN Club in Budapest in 1964 (cf. his account in Svedectv 7: 6975),
the Czechoslovak government applied in vain to its Hungarian allies for his
extradition (Zdek Hon). In July 1967, he was sentenced in absentia to fourteen years in prison in a trial that attracted considerable international attention. A co-defendant, the young writer Jan Benes (who, unlike Tigrid, had the
misfortune to be present in person), was convicted of collaboration with Svedectv and given five years. Benes later blamed Tigrid for his arrest, suspecting
him of a deliberate indiscretion in order to publicize a forthcoming book!
By the early 1960s it had become abundantly clear to the authorities in
Prague that Svedectv must be taken seriously: neither had it gone out of business after the first few numbers (like so many other exile periodicals), nor
could its distribution in the CSSR be effectively prevented. The journals
ideology, aims, and strategies were now objects of serious analysis at the ideological department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, a treatment of Svedectv that differed in nature from the ongoing intelligence operations, as well as from the more direct propaganda of the post-1968 phase
(see below). The results of such examinations were, of course, not intended
for the general reader, but distributed among a few political cadres. Never-
271
theless, the September 1965 number of the Party brochure series Studijn
prameny (Study Sources) with a confidential analysis of Svedectv somehow
fell into the hands of Tigrid, who published the whole text in the pages of his
own periodical, gleefully including the title page, which bore the words For
internal use only. Do not replicate! (8: 419).
Over the past few years, the readers of Svedectv learnt from this text, the
journal has attempted to intensify the effect of its ideological diversion by
adapting itself to certain moods and tendencies in our country. [] It is remarkably well informed and adopts a concrete and matter-of fact approach,
thus subtly concealing its attacks on communism (41920). Unlike the
cruder propagandistic campaigns of the nineteen seventies, which tended to
associate Svedectv with Sudeten-German nationalism, the Studijn prameny
analysis correctly pointed out that Tigrids journal distances itself from revanchist tendencies, propagating instead Central European reconciliation by
means of a normalization of relations between East and West (427). For Czechoslovakia, we are told, Svedectv demanded greater independence from the
Soviet Union, artfully employing references to national traditions and devoting special attention to the Slovak question.
Svedectv attempts to maximize the effect of its propaganda by studying in great detail the
inner conditions of various countries and by a differentiated approach to individual
countries as well as to separate social classes within these countries. [] This propaganda
does not hesitate to include Marxist terminology in its arsenal. [] It has an especially
strong orientation towards our youth and various strata of the intelligentsia [], attempting to bring the intelligentsia and the cultural front into opposition to the Party. (43233)
Ignoring for a moment the ideological bias of the text (which is omnipresent
but does not actually get in the way of the factual analysis), it must be admitted
that the unknown Party strategist writing for Studijn prameny actually offered a fairly perceptive study of Svedectv. The fact that such analysis was not
meant to be published even made it possible, in some instances, to acknowledge the opponents strengths. Oldrich Pilts Formy ideologick diverze, cinnost
emigrace a rozvedek (Forms of Ideological Diversion, migr and Intelligence
Activity), a booklet intended for instructional purposes at the Partys Academy of Political Science, explicitly separated the realism of Tigrids journal
from other, more conservative exile institutions: Svedectv contends that in
spite of all the utter nonsense programmatically proclaimed by the Council of
Free Czechoslovakia [] revisionism inside the Communist Party is a political
reality that can be built upon. And the author goes on to admit: It reckons
with such revisionist phenomena as really do exist [in our country], in various
public spheres: the economy, science, culture, among the university professors and students (Pilt 108109).
272
A third form of regime activity against Svedectv differed from these writings
in that it addressed the general public in the CSSR and was not meant to offer
a sober analysis of the enemys doings, but rather to discredit him in the eyes
of a larger, less informed audience, often by means of downright slander. This
strategy became especially common during normalization in the nineteen
seventies, when Tigrid was widely presented as one of the intellectual incendiaries behind the Prague Spring.
A TV program called Pod maskou soukromnka (Under the Mask of a Private
Citizen) was aired by the Czech Broadcasting Company in March 1979, dedicated to Svedectv and its chief editor. Tigrid is introduced as a propagator of
war, who has for many years regarded terror as the only means of political
struggle, [but] now on orders from Washington inclines towards a so-called
politics of building bridges and dialogue. Karel Jezdinsky (109) calls the
show feeble-minded and it certainly is made in a somewhat awkwardly sensationalist fashion. Dramatic music will sound in the background, as mysterious pairs of feet hurry along dark corridors. The writer Ota Ornest appears
and confesses how he betrayed his people as a collaborator of Svedectv (Ornest
had been sentenced to three and a half years in prison in 1977 and was granted
a pardon in return for his public kowtow). Footage shot with a secret camera at
Prague Central Station documents the arrest of two German students who
had attempted to smuggle a vanload of Svedectv into the country. Good patriotic workers recount how they were approached and baited by the evil one:
Not long ago, I received a package with a postage mark from Stockholm and
dr
our precise address on it, the principal of the Peoples Art School in Z
nad Szavou recollects with a shudder: Having read a few lines, I realized
that it was subversive, seditious, and slanderous material, so I immediately
notified the State Security and handed it over to them. The commentator
triumphs: Let Tigrid do what he does, but he will see that no-one here is interested in his output. The Svedectv copies he sends are being turned in by their
intended addressees. During the roundtable discussion at the end of the program, one participant sums up the situation as follows: The socialist countries, including Czechoslovakia, are examples to the capitalist world and
dangerous examples, too. Our reality and the truth about our country are very
dangerous for our opponents. To obscure this truth and to keep the public
away from it, is, therefore, the aim of all this ideological diversion and the
mission of all the Mr. Tigrids out there (qtd. in Jezdinsky 109110).
Two pamphlets published by a certain Petr Bednr in 1978, Posledn role pana
T (The Last Role of Mr. T) and Cesta bez nvratu (Path of No Return), must
also count as examples of popular propaganda. These texts are hybrid in
terms of genre: each contains a fictitious narrative in the style of a cheap crime
273
novel, in which an unnamed first-person narrator, apparently a Czech secret

agent, moves around in Western migr circles, meeting their most prominent
representatives. These are variously depicted as thieves, drunkards, traitors,
womanizers, and former Nazi collaborators. Tigrid or Mr. T is the worst
of them all, a war deserter who spends most of his time in bed with an English
nymphomaniac and has an innocent rural activist in the CSSR murdered by
his henchmen. In addition to the narratives, both texts assume the authenticity of non-fiction by including photographs of real objects and persons. Like
the TV program, however, the documentary element of Bednrs books is adversely affected by the official taboos surrounding their subject matter: it
suffers from a distinct lack of really spectacular things to show. The author is
often reduced to presenting slightly nondescript exhibits like snapshots of the
Svedectv headquarters from the outside or press portraits of Tigrid. A pile of
confiscated copies and a letter written by the chief editor to the CIA, apparently had to be photographed from a safe distance, so as to make sure the
writing was illegible.
Popular propaganda against Svedectv in Czechoslovakia made frequent use
of an alarmingly familiar image: the character of Tigrid is drawn as scheming,
shady, sly, and sneaky, and a suitcase full of CIA dollars is invariably part of his
iconography. The anti-Semitic clichs employed here are fairly obvious.
Sometimes, the regime could be even more direct. The way in which the jury
and the official press emphasized the defendants Jewish origins when Tigrid-Schnfeld was convicted of treason in 1967, was one of the motives
prompting his colleague Ladislav Mnacko to emigrate to Israel (cf. Svedectv 8:
585, Jezdinsky 106). And after Tigrid had published his above-mentioned article on the Czechoslovak national character, the Party organ Rud pravo (Red
Law) explicitly commented that in view of the authors ancestry our national
character is not his business in the first place. Paradoxically, when it came to
attacking Tigrid and Svedectv, conservative exiles and communist propagandists were often in a position to borrow each others imagery and arguments.
Works Cited
Bednr, Petr. Posledn role pana T (The Last Role of Mr. T). Prague: Magnet, 1978.
Bednr, Petr. Cesta bez nvratu (Path of No Return). Prague: Magnet, 1978.
Bendov, Jana, and Ivana Tigridov. Svedectv Ivany Tigridov (The Testimony of Ivana
Tigrid). Mlad Fronta Dnes (October 27, 2006). http://www.margolius.co.uk/MFrontaDnes.htm.
Culik, Jan. Zemrel Pavel Tigrid (Pavel Tigrid Has Died). Britsk listy (September 1, 2003).
http://www.blisty.cz/art/15222.html.
274
Exilov periodika. Katalog periodik ceskho a slovenskho exilu a krajanskych tisku vydvanych po roce
1945 (Exile Periodicals. A Catalogue of Czech and Slovak Periodicals in Exile and Local
Printed Materials Published after 1945). Ed. Lucie Formanov, Jir Gruntord, and Michal Pribn. Prague: Libri prohibiti, 1999.
Halada, Andrej. Pavel Tigrid spchal sebevrazdu (Pavel Tigrid Committed Suicide). Reflex online (September 12, 2003). http://www.reflex.cz/Clanek14033.html.
Jezdinsky, Karel. Svedectv a prazsky rezim (Svedectv and the Prague Regime). Lederer 99112.
Kaiser, Daniel and Pavel Tigrid. Poprv i naposledy jsem veril Grebenckovi (rozhovor s
Pavlem Tigridem) (I Have Trusted Grebencek for the First and Last Time [A Conversation with Pavel Tigrid]). Lidov noviny (November 25, 2000).
Kovtun, Jir. Politicky spisovatel Pavel Tigrid (Pavel Tigrid, the Political Writer). Lederer 1728.
Kren, Jan. Do emigrace (Into Emigration). Prague: Nase vojsko, 1963.
Kundera, Milan. Nesnesiteln lehkost byt (The Unbearable Lightness of Being). Toronto:
Sixty-Eight Publishers, 1984. First published in French as Linsoutenable lgret de ltre.
Kundera, Milan. The Tragedy of Central Europe. The New York Review of Books (April 26,
1984). 3338.
Lederer, Jir, and Pavel Tigrid. Rozhovor s Pavlem Tigridem (A Conversation with Pavel
Tigrid). Lederer 916.
Lederer, Jir. Svedectv Pavla Tigrida (Pavel Tigrids Svedectv). Frankfurt/Main: Opus bonum,
1982.
Luza, Radomr. V Hitlerove objet (In Hitlers Embrace). Prague: Torst, 2006.
ivotn kliky Pavla Tigrida (The Fortunes of Pavel
Pecinka, Bohumil, and Pavel Tigrid. Z
Tigrid). Pavel Tigrid. Marx na Hradcanech (Marx on the Hradcin). Prague: Barrister &
Principal, 2001. 724.
Pilt. Oldrich. Formy ideologick diverze, cinnost emigrace a rozvedek (Forms of Ideological Diversion, migr and Intelligence Activity). Prague: Vysok skola politick V KSC, 1971.
Postov, Martina. Poctky Svedectv, ctvrtletnku Pavla Tigrida, a reakce komunistickho
rezimu v CSR na jeho existence (The Beginnings of Pavel Tigrids Quarterly Svedectv
and the Reaction of the Communist Regime in the CSR to its Existence), B.A. Thesis.
University of Brno, 2007. http://is.muni.cz/th/163110/ff_b.
Schulz, Milan. My tady a oni tam (We here and they there). Lederer 11322.
Svedectv. Ctvrtletnk pro politiku a kulturu (Testimony. Quarterly for Politics and Culture). Ed.
Pavel Tigrid, et al. 25 vols. New York: Jir Hork, 19561960, Paris: Jir Hork, Radomr
Luza, and Svedectv, 196090, Prague: Melantrich, 199092.
Skvorecky, Josef. Svedectv v mm zivote (Svedectv in My Life). Lederer 16771.
Tigrid, Pavel. Politick emigrace v atomovm veku (Political Emigration in the Atomic Age).
Paris: Svedectv, 1968.
Tigrid, Pavel. Le Printemps de Prague (The Prague Spring). Paris: Seuil, 1968.
Tigrid, Pavel. Why Dubcek Fell. Trans. Lucy Lawrence from the French La Chute irrsistible
dAlexander Dubcek. London: Macdonald, 1971.
Tigrid, Pavel. Na prazsk jaro jsem nikdy neveril (I Never Believed in the Prague Spring).
Lidov noviny ( January 13, 1990).
Tigrid, Pavel. Kapesn pruvodce inteligentn zeny po vlastnm osudu (The Intelligent Womans
Pocket Guide to Her Own Fate). 1988. Prague: Academia, 2000.
Tigrid, Pavel. Marx na Hradcanech (Marx on the Hradcin). 1960. Brno: Barrister & Principal,
2001.
275
Vladislav, Jan. Svedectv a literatura (Svedectv and Literature). Lederer 5178.

Zach, Ales. Kniha a cesky exil 19491990 (The Book and Czech Exile 19491990). Prague:
Torst 1995.
Zdek, Petr. Tajemn svedectv Pavla Tigrida (The Secret Testimony of Pavel Tigrid). Lidov noviny (October 21, 2006).
Zdek, Petr. Hon na strycka bycka (The Hunt for Uncle Bull). Lidov noviny (September 1,
2007).
276
Monica Lovinescu at Radio Free Europe

Camelia Craciun
In retrospect, my generation seems to be divided between exils and

convicts. There were, of course, in the same generation communist
winners (meaning they became communists when the self-imposed
Red Army entered the country). But these people I knew very little or
not at all. Before I even understood what History was about, I was
already among its losers. (Lovinescu, La apa Vavilonului 1: 26)
[May 10, 1946] I write in my Diary: What can I have in common with
politics? A question I will contest my whole life. If destiny has
corners, a devil must be watching me from there, smiling sardonically
and repeating my stupid question from that moment on. He does not
stop asking me this question. And smiling. (La apa Vavilonului, 1: 41)
On the evening of November 18, 1977, Radio-Free-Europe journalist Monica

Lovinescu was physically attacked in her own courtyard in Paris, while returning home. Two men speaking French with a strange accent approached her
for delivering a message, but she refused to let them come into the house, as
she found something unusual about them. They started beating her cruelly
and ran away only when a passerby entered the courtyard, alerted by the cries
of Lovinescu, who became unconscious. The head of the Securitate (Romanian Secret Police), General Ion Mihai Pacepa, defected later to the United
States and revealed conversations with his direct boss, President Nicolae
Ceausescu. From these, Lovinescu learned that the Party and its Leader were
extremely concerned that the international image of the country suffered
from the criticism that she and her husband Virgil Ierunca broadcasted in
their weekly program at Radio Free Europe. RFEs activity had in general
been of a great concern to Ceausescu because it heavily criticized the frequent
human rights violations in Romania, and the personality cult around the
leader and his wife. As Lovinescu often confessed in her journal and memoirs,
she was amazed to find out how influential and powerful the Romanian officials believed she was; they apparently overestimated her influence at Radio
Free Europe, and her capacity to rally the French and international press and
public opinion against the regime. Nevertheless, her voice was indeed in-
Monica Lovinescu at Radio Free Europe (Camelia Craciun)
277
fluential and her broadcasts reached many intellectual and political circles
abroad, and, more importantly, in Romania. Mostly she succeeded in connecting people and organizing actions to rehabilitate the moral and intellectual
reputation of Romanian writers blacklisted by a regime that also launched
defamation campaigns after their defection to the West, to save individuals
whose lives were threatened in Romania by building up dossiers of humanrights infringements, and to re-establish the literary reputation of those who
became marginalized when they refused to support the regime.
In this article I analyze the mechanisms Monica Lovinescu used in building
her influential position among French journalists and intellectuals as well as
among the Romanian exile community abroad. I am also interested in her
reputation and popularity with the Romanian audience at home, which found
in her discourse a political and cultural criticism that could not be voiced inside the country. Lovinescu was a credible reference source for the Western
press and intellectuals in matters of Romanian culture and politics. I analyze
her popularity and credibility in terms of her personal background (family,
connections at home, intellectual milieu, and education), her privileged position at the Romanian unit of RFE, her cultural and political criticism, and, finally, her essential role in a series of communication networks within the Romanian exile community, French journalists and intellectuals, and Romanian
intellectuals at home. I perceive her as a strong media force, and I attempt to
understand her position as a radio journalist who broadcasts mainly for a Romanian public deprived of media choices and personal liberties. Listeners at
home found that her programs represented their own criticism and revolt.
She offered them a critique and a counter voice to the communist political
and cultural ideology. Eventually I focus on her strategy to create a reputation, on her function, and on her impact.
The research I undertook for this article relied mainly on primary sources,
since there are no studies dedicated to the Romanian unit of RFE or to Monica Lovinescus activity, apart from the abundant post-1989 Romanian reviews of her massive radio scripts, her incomplete journals (both Lovinescus
and Ieruncas journals from the 195070 period were destroyed and only partially reconstructed), her memoirs, interview volumes and a novel. In the few
studies that have been dedicated to the Romanian intellectual exiles and to the
literary life of the communist period, she is perceived as a major figure of the
exile community and as an opinion leader of the Romanian public during the
communist regime, but no studies exist that would specifically analyze her
position or would take a distance from her encomiastic receptions. Since no
work has been done on the Romanian unit of RFE (and very few other published primary sources are available, apart from Lovinescus writings, mainly
278
including a couple of personal accounts of former RFE journalists), all approaches to Monica Lovinescus activity and impact have until now been relying on her personal perspective, which makes for an inherent imbalance.
Testimonies, memoirs, and other ego documents by other figures at the RFE
and in the Diaspora are rare and offer little information that could be used to
create a broader, less personal picture of her and her environment.
The broadcasting archive of RFE stored at Hoover Institution at Stanford
University, California offered me a larger perspective on the activity of the
Romanian unit. I also had access to a number of unpublished script pieces of
great relevance that Lovinescu did not include in her publications (at least
concerning the period of the mid-late 1970s and early 1980s, the focus of my
research). Finally, I was able to look at the documents of her Sunday round
tables of the French Scene broadcast, which are less known to the Romanian
public. Still in the process of classifying the materials, the RFE archive is a vast
resource, containing most of the daily broadcast scripts (alas with gaps, due
to the unfinished classification and the extremely scanty documentation
of the first decades) as well as the tapes of the programs (not yet digitized,
which makes comparisons with the printed material difficult). The corporate
archive, containing materials ranging from broadcasting policy to personnel
files and minutes from meetings complements the broadcast material.
Further research should focus on oral history through interviews with RFE
contributors, exiles, and Romanian intellectuals from the network I shall
identify in my article.
1. Personal Background
Coming from intellectual and social elite, Monica Lovinescu had a strong
public legitimacy at home and credibility in the exile community, with which
she was in close contact even before her departure for France. As she often
noted in her memoir, the burden of such a resounding name forced her to perceive culture as a vocation, but also as a challenge to prove her own ideas and
statements. In exile, the young Monica did not struggle with problems of isolation, but could immediately connect to known networks. The massive migration of the intelligentsia from communist Romania was reflected also inside the network constructed around the literary circle of her father, Sburatorul
(Winged Spirit/Incubus; 191927; 194647), which practically moved from
Bucharest to Paris. Finally, the tragic death of her mother and grandmother,
victims of the purges imposed by the Communist regime on the interwar elite,
further precipitated her strong criticism on the Romanian political system.
279
Born in 1923 as daughter of Eugen Lovinescu, the famous literary and cultural critic of the interwar period, and of Ecaterina Balacioiu, who descended
from an old Wallachian landowner family with connections to the royal court,
Monica grew up in the milieu of the Sburatorul literary circle and its eponymous journal. Her father gathered a large part of the Romanian intelligentsia
of the time in his open house for meetings, lunches, dinners, public readings,
and debates. She enjoyed the acquaintance and the friendship of many Romanian intellectuals from an early age on, became familiar with the intellectual environment of the time, and profited much from her fathers great intellectual reputation and authority.
Eugen Lovinescu came from a middle-class Moldavian intellectual family; his
ancestors were schoolmasters and teachers, while his nephews became important writers and critics in the postwar period. Horia Lovinescu, for instance, was a
well-known playwright during the communist regime, whose plays were often
staged and acclaimed for their ideological support of Communism; Vasile Lovinescu became an essayist. Horias and Vasiles prominence on the communist literary and cultural scene represented a discontinuity with the familys prewar intellectual reputation, but also with Monica, their French-naturalized relative at
Radio Free Europe. Another famous Lovinescu family member, Anton Holban,
was one of the most innovative prose writers among the young generation
coming at age after World War I. Eugen Lovinescu was one of the most authoritative literary critics and historians of the interwar literary period. A main promoter of modernism, he engaged in major debates with the Samanatorul group,
and such traditionalist and populist intellectuals as Nicolae Iorga and Garabet
Ibraileanu, in which he introduced his theory of synchronism as the main form
of modernizing national literatures. His liberal, cosmopolitan, and modernist
views were laid down in his canonic Istoria civilizatiei romne moderne (History of
Modern Romanian Civilization), published in 192425, and in his Istoria literaturii
romne contemporane (History of Contemporary Romanian Literature) from
192629; his journal Sburatorul was open to many literary trends, especially to
symbolism and avant-guardism. Since Lovinescu published also works by several Jewish authors, the extreme right-wing labeled the journal and its director as
Judaized, blacklisted him in late 1930s, led a press campaign against his antinational views, and even accused him of encouraging political conspiracy during his literary circle meetings in his house shortly before his death in 1943. Yet
Lovinescu was by no means unbiased. Notwithstanding his openness to all talents, his prejudice appeared in his literary notes as well as in his histories, which
contain a whole separate section on writers of Jewish decent.
After his death, the end of World War II, and the coming to power of the
communist regime, Eugen Lovinescu was excluded from the Romanian cul-
280
tural canon for almost two decades. The communist regime confiscated the library Lovinescu left to his daughter and former wife. His books were burnt
by the Securitate, while the home of the famous literary club became a private
residence of a Secret Police officer: the communists erased Lovinescus physical, as well as intellectual legacy. During the liberalization of the 1960s, his cultural influence was reconsidered and he was republished and included in the
intellectual debates again.
Thus Monica inherited a famous name and the pressure that goes with it:
every gesture, look or silence of his [Eugens] seems to express I write,
therefore I exist (I dare paraphrasing Descartes my father would never
make such jokes). Was it not because of this that I started scribbling on a
paper in order to exist in front of him? (Vavilonului 1: 15)? Although she did
not cultivate the memory of her father and his literary work in her radio programs, her memoirs testified to a cult of her father, especially due to his early
death and his marginalization in the postwar period.
After getting a degree in French literature and starting a career in academia,
Monica received a French Government scholarship and left Romania in 1947,
at age twenty-three. The following year, when communists consolidated their
power, and all Romanian students were ordered to return home, Monica applied for political asylum and started an exile life that terminated only in 1989:
Leaving for Paris meant getting out of this prison, even if I thought I would
depart only for one-two years, until the Occident will free the East. I would
have never left my mother otherwise. I have not imagined, not even for a second, that it will be for a lifetime (Vavilonului 1: 43). The Romanian exile community gradually grew and she slowly rebuilt her home network in France and
abroad, strengthening her personal bonds under the new circumstances. The
wish to build a strong opposition to the communist regime at home diminished the political differences among the exiles. In the beginning, Lovinescu
worked with Eugne Ionesco and met early Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran, and
Stefan Lupascu. She worked as an assistant theatre director, founding an
avant-garde company with a few friends in Paris. Subsequently she became a
translator, a literary agent for memoirs written by former inmates of communist prisons, and an announcer for the Romanian unit of Radio Paris. She married Virgil Ierunca, editor of Ethos, Limite, and other Romanian cultural publications in exile; her cultural and political radio criticism complemented his
printed publications and later radio work. They often treated the same issues
through different channels of communication to increase their effectiveness.
The fate of Monicas maternal family strongly motivated her political engagement and anti-Communist stance. On her mother side, she came from a
rich and well positioned aristocratic family: the Balacioius were an old landed
281
boyar clan, while the Plesoianus were connected to the Bratianu and Tatarescu families members of the Romanians aristocracy connected to the
Royal Court. Gheorghe Tatarescu, cousin of Monica Lovinescus mother, belonged to the National Liberal Party and was twice prime-minister of Romania (in 19341937 and 19391940), representing the emerging ambitious
Romanian bourgeoisie. The Balacioiu family was, of course, subjected to
persecution under the communist regime. Monica was already an exile in
France when her grandmother and mother, to whom she was very close, died
in Romania. Her grandmother, already in her eighties and deprived of her
property, was forced to walk in chains behind a horse cart for several kilometers on a freezing winter day; she died soon afterwards, due to exhaustion
and cold (Vavilonului 1: 39). Monicas mother, Ecaterina Balacioiu, was arrested in 1958 and pressured to convince her daughter to curb her attacks on
communist Romania: in prison she refused the Securitate offer to release
her in exchange for a letter from her asking me to collaborate with them. She
preferred dying in order to give birth to me for the second time, into the freedom of being myself (Vavilonului 1: 14). As a punishment for resisting blackmail, in prison Ecaterina Balacioiu was deprived of medical care for her several chronic illnesses, and died within two years. Deeply affected by this
tragedy, Monica later provided material, information, and support for a book
she was unable to write herself because of the long-range effects of her
trauma. In Aceasta dragoste care ne leaga (This Love that Binds Us; 1998), Doina
Jela historically and socially reconstructed the life and tragic death of Ecaterina Balaciou in communist prisons, presenting her as representative of many
women who were persecuted because they came from the old elite. The book
has received several awards. In her memoirs and diaries, Monica Lovinescu
saw her mothers death as an indubitable crime of the communist regime and
a human sacrifice for her intellectual and political independence. Her relation
to Romania and to her own past changed dramatically: the unidentifiable
common grave into which my mothers corpse was thrown, turned for me all
of Romanias soil into a possible tomb (Vavilonului 1: 1920).
2. Media Position and Political Discourse

In the course of more than thirty years of broadcasting at Radio Free Europe,
Lovinescu established herself as a critical authority not only of the communist
regime in Romania, but also of the conditions throughout all totalitarian Eastern Europe. Working for Radio Free Europe was her great chance to establish
her stature and acquire an impact both at home and in exile circles. This popu-
282
larity and remarkable authority came from several sources: her microphone,
the political suppression of the Romanian public she was addressing, and her
topics and general tone of broadcasting. The radio persona she built for herself embodied the opposition of Radio Free Europe to Romanian communist
political and cultural propaganda. In her weekly pieces featuring specific
political and cultural events in Romania, she perceived, contextualized, and
criticized the inner mechanism that governed local practices behind the Iron
Curtain. Lovinescu offered a glimpse of what went on behind the curtain, for
the Romanian public that censorship deprived of insights, but also for the
exile community, which was not fully aware of what was happening at home.
Radio Free Europe unequivocally opposed the Romanian communist regime. Created in 1949 in New York by the National Committee for a Free
Europe, and funded by the U. S. Congress through the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA), RFE was supposed to broadcast news and programs for five
countries behind the Iron Curtain: Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria. Its headquarters in Munich were complemented by correspondence offices in Paris, Vienna, and Rome, other Western cities with
significant exile communities, to make recruiting easier (Puddington 39). Monica Lovinescu and Ierunca, together with other Romanian collaborators
were based in Paris, a major center of Romanian exiles. RFE started broadcasting with the Czechoslovak program ( July 4, 1950); the Romanian transmission followed as second on July 14. RFE had an attached research institute concerned with regional information and surveys, which published the
Eastern European Research Bulletin (weekly) and the Daily Report. They provided
the Western academic and general public with background information
about the state of affairs in the region. The radio broadcast was very efficient
and managed to inform the listeners faster than the media in the countries of
report (for example, the 1977 Bucharest earthquake was reported on three
hours earlier in the RFE news than in the Romanian media, and it also offered faster basic information for the rescuers and survivors). The broadcasts
were mainly on domestic and international politics, as well as cultural affairs;
there was a permanent staff for each language unit, but external/temporary
collaborators were also used. The RFE Paris office was suspended in 1992;
the Munich headquarters moved to Prague and the Czech, Hungarian, and
Polish units were dissolved.
Concerning the political orientation of the RFE, Virgil Tanase dissident
at home, later in Parisian exile, participant of Monica Lovinescus human
rights network, and contributor to RFE commented in his volume Ma Roumanie (1990):
283
The literary broadcasts of Radio Free Europe contained [] reversed Stalinism: the
good became the bad and vice versa, but the basic principle was the same: the political
took precedence over the literary. It had a deliberate and shocking determination for
anti-communist pro-Western propaganda. The rule was: culturally, [] we dont speak
of what we dont like; Radio Free Europe was influenced by its origins: it was created by
the Americans for anti-communist propaganda reasons. Literary, for example, it performed what I would call reversed Socialist Realism. Unconsciously, the directors and
journalists of Radio Free Europe were, actually, anti-communists in a basic rudimentary
form in their heart and mind, unable to perform a rationally detached analysis. (Manolescu 306)
Due to its clear anti-communist position in terms of broadcasting among

other foreign broadcasting companies transmitting for Eastern Europe, RFE
enjoyed probably one of the highest listener ratings in Romania, which led to a
rapid increase in the number of broadcasting hours and collaborators, as well
as a diversification of its program. In the early 1950s, when Romania counted
about twenty radio receivers/1000 inhabitants (compared to hundred fifty in
Czechoslovakia), the Romanian RFE unit had only a brief daily news program, because broadcasting time was allotted according to the estimated audience. According to Florin Manolescus encyclopedia of Romanian literary
exile, the daily Romanian language program expanded to six hours in the
1960s and finally reached twelve hours in late 1980s, when a Gallup survey
disclosed that the Romanian RFE had 64 % of all listeners.
The Romanian media were highly censored, and manipulated; hence
people had little interest in them. The programs consisted of distorted versions of the political national and international events, of news on the activities of the Party and its national leaders, and of cultural programs to glorify
the greatness and the success of the Romanian nation. Deprived of reliable
domestic reports on current affairs, the Romanian public was eager to listen
to the forbidden RFE and other foreign radio programs (Voice of America,
BBC, Deutsche Welle; for the Hungarian community Kossuth and Petofi
Rdi and probably some others for other minorities), which enjoyed high
popularity and increased audience. The Romanian Secret Police prosecuted
individual listening and it was especially against group listening, since this
could generate collective dissent. Nevertheless, despite control and fear, these
regulations could not prevent population to continue listening to alternative
news programs.
The Securitate Services targeted the foreign radio stations and their journalists. In addition to the mentioned attack on Monica Lovinescu, packages
with explosives were sent to Paul Goma, Nicolae Penescu, Serban Orascu and
other key journalists and intellectuals connected to RFE, and a bomb attack in
1981 against RFEs Munich headquarters partly destroyed the building caus-
284
ing great damages and severely injuring several employees. Such orchestrated
actions of the Secret Services and Police aimed at the infiltration and destruction of communication between the exiles in the West and the Romanians at
home. In spite of these efforts, RFE remained one of the few alternatives to
the national media in reporting and commenting on the news. It also
strengthened the voice of the opposition by broadcasting the texts of Romanian dissidents such as Dorin Tudoran, Paul Goma, Doina Cornea confronting
the Romanian regime, as well as the discourse of Romanian exiles criticizing
the regime.
As the quoted passage by Tanase shows, the RFEs programs were not detached, but under the influence of a strong anti-Communist ideology. By revealing the genuine Romanian political, economic, and social situation, as well
as the broader international context (supported by personal testimonies),
RFE managed to counteract domestic propaganda. However, during its first
years, RFE often countered Communist propaganda with anti-Communist
actions that exceeded the function of the radio station: it distributed, for instance, manifestoes by means of balloons and adopted a violent language, especially in the 1950s. Placed under the direct control of the US government
after the 1967 CIA funding scandal, the RFE had to adopt the official international media policies of the US, and a new internal censorship tempered the
tone and the criticism of the broadcasts. In crucial cases, the permission of
the CIA and the Department of State was necessary in order to take a more
cautious approach to the Eastern European matters. RFE gradually changed
its self-image: it no longer regarded itself as liberator, but as a liberalization inducer; this shift was entered into the policy manuals for the RFE personnel that circumscribed their approach, topics, and tone.
Lovinescu had already acquired significant experience in French and Romanian media and publishing prior to working at RFE. In Romania, she had
worked shortly as a journalist, writing mostly theater reviews for Democratia
and literature for Revista Fundatiilor Regale; she had also worked as an assistant
for Camil Petrescu, one of the most important Romanian playwrights and
drama theorists. In France, she first directed plays, translated Ion Luca Caragiale, and founded a small company where she worked with Eugne Ionesco
and Nicolas Bataille. She worked for Radio Paris (195274) as an anchor; she
also contributed to its Romanian-language broadcasts and joined as a staff
member its East-European office, contributing mostly with musical and literary reviews and reports under a pseudonym. For a short time, she became
more politically engaged in anti-communist intellectual circles, by creating a
literary agency to publish works and testimonies of East-European refugees
in France; but she failed, for instance, in her attempts to publish in the
285
strongly leftist Paris of the 1950s Victor Nekrassovs novel on Stalingrad,

which came out only in 1963. She translated, under the pseudonym Claude
Pascal, Adriana Georgescus Au commencement tait la fin (At the Beginning was
the End), and Virgil Constantin Gheorghius La Vingt cinquime heure (The
Twenty-fifth Hour) under the pseudonym Monique Saint-Cme. Apart from
radio and translating activity, she also published articles in the French journals
Kontinent, Les Cahiers de lEst, Preuves, LAlternative and in such Romanian exile
publications as Caiete de dor, Ethos, and Dialog. Fearing retaliations against her
mother, who was still a prisoner in Romania, Monica wrote under pseudonyms until the early 1960s; after her mothers death she wrote under her own
name and became more critical of the Romanian regime.
Monica Lovinescu became a well-known public figure among Romanian
audiences only when she began broadcasting at RFE. As she reports in her
Short Waves volumes, she started working there in 1961, and stopped only
when RFE decided in 1992 to close down all offices in Western Europe. As
time went on, her activity diversified. In 1967 she launched three weekly
programs: Teze si antiteze la Paris (Thesis and Antithesis in Paris, broadcast on Sundays and renamed The French Scene by RFE) gave Sunday
updates on the French cultural scene for the Romanian public; Puncte de
vedere (Points of view), included in the general news bulletin Actualitatea
romneasca (Romanian Current Events, broadcast on Thursdays/Tuesdays
and renamed Domestic bloc by RFE) presented a critical view of Romanian intellectual and political life; a third one, focusing on the Romanian exile
culture, was later taken over by Theodor Cazaban. The expansion of the Romanian cultural broadcasts was especially remarkable after 1975. Ierunca,
Monicas husband, created the Cronica pesimistului (Chronic of the Pessimist) review column on Thursdays, and the Saturday program Povestea
vorbei. Pagini uitate, pagini cenzurate, pagini exilate (The Story of Words.
Forgotten, Censored and Exiled Pages) on Anatol Baconskys Biserica neagra
(The Black Church), Paul Gomas novels and other censured Romanian literary texts. In the 1970s, Jacob Poppers Sunday feature program introduced
texts by East-European exiles, interviewed international experts on Eastern
Europe, and reviewed or read in translation articles of the international
press. The rich weekly schedule also included the religious broadcast World
of Religion, a Listeners Mail, and the music programs Metronom, and
Top 20. Lovinescus programs were soon noted by Romanias political
leaders, who feared negative publicity abroad and critical opposition at
home. The attack against Monica Lovinescu was planned by the Securitate
at the specific request of Ceausescu, as General Pacepa recounts in his
memoir.
286
Lovinescu vividly described in La apa Vavilonului her professional dedication as well as the technical aspects of her work:
First, I was working for around an hour and twenty minutes of weekly broadcasts
meaning at least 23 books to read per week (about French and Romanian cultural life),
lots of newspapers from both areas too, performances, concerts, and movies. At home,
many more hours were dedicated to the typing of the broadcast texts, to taping and
mixing the round tables as well as the musical and sound effects (we had to build up a
whole professional laboratory at home in Buttes Chaumont). Working home was a
necessity, not luxury. Since Radio Free Europe had here the status of a correspondence
office, broadcasting through telephone or a special line (for which reportages or chronicles were not allowed to exceed a time limit), we could not occupy the studio with long
programs more than once a week. We became the only cultural exception of such
length in this office, where not only the East-European nations were crowded together,
but, after a while, when Radio Free Europe joined Radio Liberty on avenue Rapp, we
also shared the space with Russians, Lithuanians, Uzbeks, Ossetians and other nations
of the Soviet Empire. [] Every week, we mixed methodically the texts read by the
speaker [] with music copied at home from the vinyl and the tapes already recorded
with dialogues and round tables. Within maximum three hours of work in the studio, we
accomplished the impossible: almost three hours of broadcasting. [] From there we
moved on with our bags filled with tapes, to which we added manuscripts or books
brought by the collaborators, visitors from home, or exiles. (2: 206207)
Teze si antiteze la Paris and Puncte de vedere had specific cultural and
political agendas. The latter analyzed the Romanian cultural and political
situation, while the former presented French cultural news for the Romanian audience. Although each broadcast had its own cultural topic, they were
embedded in a coherent political discourse, so that the material at hand
served to illustrate Lovinescus political opinion. The topics came mostly
from a broadly conceived literary field, but she was also interested in political events and social actions, especially when they affected literature: trials of
writers and intellectuals in Eastern Europe, infringements on human rights,
political congresses, cases of censorship, propaganda, and enforcements of
the Socialist Realism aesthetic doctrine. Rather than merely updating the Romanian public on the Western cultural and political situation, or just summarizing the current situation in Romania through a critical lens, Lovinescu
always had a political agenda. Whether speaking about the latest book on
history or political theory, about a novel, about the latest exhibition, music
recital, or theater performance in Paris, organizing a round table discussion
on the profile of certain intellectuals, or Romanian press releases, commemorations, a new legislation, or a recent political congress with its internal
fights and dissensions Lovinescu used all these cases to articulate her antiCommunism.
287
Indeed, Lovinescus broadcasts followed the RFE line: revealing the ideological bias of the Romanian media, RFE adopted a political perspective that
was itself engaged rather than detached. Taking an anti-communist stance,
Lovinescu and Ierunca came to associate also with some right-wing exiles
with dubious pasts. Thus they frequented the exile literary circle of L. M. Arcade (Mamaliga), writer and lawyer established in Paris; Ierunca maintained
close connections with Paul Miron, professor at Freiburg University and Ioan
Cusa, poet and editor in Paris. Ieruncas broadcasts promoted Constantin Dumitrescu-Zapadas right-wing analysis of the Communist regime, Cetatea totala.
Monica Lovinescus weekly column on Romania gave much attention to
the propaganda in Partys cultural and press policy. She reacted to the Tenth
Party Congress (especially to writers that towed the line), commented on the
regimes propaganda campaign planning to reshape Romanias political image
with a massive program of literary translations, and revealed that the clandestine publication Tribuna Romniei was edited by Bucharest officials to infiltrate
the Romanian exile community. Lovinescu attacked the corruption of the Romanian intellectual and political elite, especially of the group around Eugen
Barbu that published Saptamna (The Week) and frequently attacked her. She
exposed the political compromises of important writers complying with the
regime as Dinu Sararu, D. R. Popescu, or Tudor Arghezi.
Lovinescu followed a similar agenda with her French cultural news in Teze si
antiteze la Paris. She reviewed books on political theory, histories of the other
communist regimes, sociological analyses of the totalitarian movements, as
well as testimonies, biographies and memoirs that exposed the Gulag experience. She placed the Romanian system in a comparative context. When discussing the international impact of 1956 or 1968, or the concerted actions of
East-European dissidents, her main concern was always the situation in Romania. Conversely, she always contextualized her Romanian reports with
comparisons to the situation in the Soviet Union, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia. In 1968, for instance, she extensively and
warmly greeted the reform movement in Prague: she reported on the creation
of Klub 231, uniting the former political prisoners of the Stalinist period to
rehabilitate them, and the Critical Thinking Club (on April 6); she reviewed
Morvan Lebesques notes on his trip to Prague (on April 20); reported on intellectuals traveling to and writing about Prague (on April 27); and discussed
(on May 4) the case of the philosophy professor Ivan Svitk, who defected to
the US. Her aim was to provide Romanian listeners with reliable information,
but also to give examples that could be followed in Romania.
Lovinescu wanted to engender in the public at home a feeling of solidarity
with those suffering under similar regimes. She informed her audience of
288
books written by Polish writers, or of actions taken by Hungarian intellectuals, to show that a community of oppositional thinkers existed: on April 17,
1965 she presented Tibor Drys book Mr. G. A. in X; on June 12, 1965 she
presented the case of Mihailo Mihailov, who was put in jail in Yugoslavia because of his article Ljeto moskovsko 1964 (Moscow Summer 1964); on
January 3, 1981 she discussed Andrzej Wajdas film The Marble Man; on February 16, 1984 she reviewed Milan Kunderas LInsoutenable lgret de ltre (The
Unbearable Lightness of Being). With keen interest in theoretical analyses of
the communist political regimes in East-Central Europe, she reviewed relevant publications in France, for instance works by Raymond Aron, Jules
Monnerot, Andr Glucksmann, and Aleksandr Zinoviev. Her views often
conflicted with leftist and pro-communist positions in France, which supported the Soviet line and denied until very late the atrocities committed behind the Iron Curtain. She presented such criticisms in her radio broadcasts;
what could not be said openly, for instance her criticism of the French intellectuals leading the 1968 events in Paris, found its way into her personal
papers.
Lovinescu often clashed with leftist French fellow-travelers, who closed
their eyes for a long time to the realities behind the Iron Curtain; she even
considered leaving France. As she recalls, the harmony between me and
Paris became flawless (or almost) only after mid-1970s, when I reckoned that
the ideological nightmare was over, at least for Paris (Vavilonului 2: 218).
Working for RFE, her political opinions became more and more articulate
and critical. In the 1970s and 80s, when the situation in Romania worsened,
she expanded the original cultural focus of her broadcasts to include social
and political analyses of Romanian life. Thus, in 1985 and 1986 she discussed
Bucharests demolition program, which formed part of Ceausescus systematization project to reorganize and homogenize rural and urban space, implicitly aiming at the destruction of many historical areas reminding of the
past and rebuilding the space according to communist principles. She also attacked the grandiose absurdity of the House of the People project; she discussed the 1987 workers revolt in Brasov, the food shortages, the Militias repression of all protests, as well as the 1977 earthquake.
Monica Lovinescu was a relentless and hard-hitting critic of intellectual
parvenus and their abuses at home. In one famous case (broadcasted on
March 16, 1979), she revealed that Eugen Barbus novel Incognito plagiarized a
novel by Konstantin Paustovski; in another case ( January 13, 1978), she contrasted Alexandru Philippides praise of the communist regime with his anticommunist interwar past. Her weekly columns also constructed a new cultural and moral canon by reconsidering forgotten, forbidden, or marginalized
289
texts, intellectuals, groups, and journals, as well as by publicizing dissident

political protest. Repeatedly comparing domestic positions with intellectual
criticism and dissent in Poland and Czechoslovakia, she made the apathy and
dividedness of the Romanian intelligentsia evident. Asking for the de-politicization of Romanias captive literature, she tried to establish continuity with
the pre-communist liberal and (quasi)conservative culture, and pleaded for
the relevance of non-communist experiences.
In this sense, Lovinescu proposed political alternatives and an alternative
cultural canon. Politically, her criticism often went from theoretical considerations over into political activism (manifestations, boycotts, protests, collecting signatures, and spreading memoranda) coordinated through the RFE network:
when we succeeded to save a person from persecution, we were happy, not because of
vanity, but because we had the impression, incredibly magnified, that our work is not futile []; by means of our regular broadcasts, we could prevent the disappearance of
people, help avoid imprisonments, or we could help release suspects interned by the regime in psychiatric hospitals. (Vavilonului 2: 51)
Ieruncas series of debates on the Fenomenul Pitesti (The Pitesti Phenomenon: a

political prison especially dreaded for its inhuman treatment of inmates) became one of the first investigations of the Romanian version of Gulag and attracted massive interest from the Romanian as well as from an international
audience. Lovinescu tackled the plight of Paul Goma, Dorin Tudoran, Virgil
Tanase, Dan Petrescu, Bujor Nedelcovici, and other persecuted Romanian
dissidents. Addressing sometimes directly the officials via RFE, she tried by
revealing their plight to force the government to ease the situation of the dissidents and terminate actions against them.
Lovinescu repeatedly drew public attention to Marin Sorescu, Dimitrie Stelaru, and others, whose works were ignored in Romania because they did not
adhere to Socialist Realism and did not praise the system. She tried to recuperate formerly acknowledged works that were excluded from the communist
canon, and she took a strong position on cultural policy, by closely following
meetings, and exclusions from the Writers Union. Reacting against the
planned destruction of Mircea Zacius literary dictionary, or calling public attention to politically marginalized intellectuals as Constantin Noica, was part
of Monica Lovinescus strategy of revealing the Partys abusive and secret
measures. Disclosing a striking case of censorship, Monica Lovinescu compared the original text of Alexandru Papilians novel Micelii (Mycelia) with its
published form. She reviewed Ion Caraions Insectele tovarasului Hitler (The Insects of Comerade Hitler), the writings of Paul Goma, Bujor Nedelcovici,
Vintila Horia, and other exiled writers, making thus exile life and debates ac-
290
cessible for the public at home. When the regime planned to co-opt wellknown migrs, Lovinescus radio program functioned as the authors channel to express publicly her discontent and refusal. Thus she compared the
censored and uncensored versions of Mircea Eliades interview with Ceausescus court poet Adrian Paunescu, and exposed a non-authorized Romanian
publication of the writings of Stefan Lupascu, internationally renowned Romanian philosopher of science living in Paris. She also revealed the opportunism of writers acclaimed in Romania, for instance by pointing out on February 21, 1961 the hypocrisy and literary failure of George Calinescus Bietul
Ioanide (Wretched Ioanide), and by exposing Tudor Arghezis political co-optation by the Party.
One could define Monica Lovinescus aim as the construction of an alternative canon by mobilizing moral and aesthetic values that had a complicated interrelation. Lovinescu insisted that the aesthetic criteria must supersede Socialist Realism, but she acknowledged literatures political
dimension. According to her, politics should enter into literature, but only as
a personal commitment, without pressure from outside. Reviewing Romanian literature of the 1980s that adopted Western postmodernism, Lovinescu criticized its avoidance of social and political reflection, especially in
comparison with the dissidents. She condemned Romanian literary escapism
for lacking a check on the political reality. Individual compromises were perceived as a new form of trahison des clercs; yet such a moral judgment
disregarded the real pressuring conditions of life and creation at home. She
wrote bluntly:
I have always found only one sin intolerable: the one committed through Word. I dont
believe that a writer disposes of two types of words, those used to lie with and those used
to express his/her very own self; some for the newspaper, for praise and for official
bows, some others for his/her work. [] The fact that one writer or another was immoral from the perspective of current moral codes this never interested me. But the
fact of burying his/her own talent in this specific case, the Word under the dirt of
abiding to politics, yes. In my view, the morality of this kind belongs to aesthetics. It is
the only one, in any case, that I practiced. (qtd. in Manolescu 454)
Within the male-dominated East-Central European exile, Lovinescu was one

of the few active women (together with Natalya Gorbanevskaya, former Russian political prisoner and poet, and Maria Bratianu, a Romanian exile activist), the only Romanian feminine voice and one of the most popular figures of
the Romanian unit at RFE. Although she advocated the cases of women
political prisoners and exiles she translated the prison memoirs of Adriana
Georgescu, a Romanian lawyer and former political prisoner with whom she
forged a solid bond; she was in contact with Maria Bratianu and Natalya
291
Gorbanevskaya; and she knew through her mothers and grandmothers experience how women suffered in the communist regime she gave surprisingly little attention to the gender specifics of politics. In any case, Lovinescus
conservative disposition was presumably not sympathetic to French Feminism of the leftist kind.
The Romanian communist regime reacted instantaneously to Lovinescus
support of dissidence: this everyday guerilla war, undertaken at Radio Free
Europe [] seemed to force the regime at home to confront difficult problems; it usually reacted in panic and clumsily (Vavilonului 2: 246). The regime
first tried to persuade her to temper her criticism by offering the copyrights of
the republished works of her father. It sent the old-style literary critics Serban
Cioculescu and Vladimir Streinu, who were close to her father and her family,
to negotiate with her. As an migr, she held no legal right over these editions;
thus the regime hoped to bribe her in an elegant way, but she refused in the
end. Subsequently, debates were set up to discredit her fathers legacy and her
mothers memory, suggesting all the while a rehabilitation of that moral and
cultural heritage if she was willing to collaborate. The mentioned physical attack on her backfired and kicked up an international storm against the Romanian communist regime and its secret police. A similar attack was planned
on Ierunca, but failed to take place. Lovinescus memoirs and diaries frequently report on intimidating messages and on attempts at a compromise
that would temper her criticism and hostility. Furthermore, she was attacked
not only in Barbus Saptamna, but also in Luceafarul, the journal of Ceausescus
other demagogue, Corneliu Vadim Tudor. They tried to undermine her credibility in the exile community as well, but she gave rebuttals in her broadcasts.
3. Networking
Lovinescus image and reputation depended also on her network within the
exile community, which she used for communicating with the intellectuals at
home, for disseminating information, and for mobilizing the international
press to protect dissident writers in Romania. I chose a case study to illustrate
how this network functioned when rescuing writers jailed in Romania, how
information about underground actions, abuses, censored publications, and
manuscripts circulated between Romania and France, and how Lovinescu
reacted to emergency cases in Romania by disseminating information, establishing a strategy of action, and contacting the right people. My analysis also
follows the way in which these actions generated public discussions in the
foreign media, and at RFE.
292
The poet Dorin Tudoran, a dissident in the 1980s, was released after a wellorganized campaign abroad. My primary materials for discussing the case are
mainly Lovinescus documents (her diaries, her memoirs, and her scripts for
RFE), which may present a one-sided picture, but I am interested here in her
personal account and in the way she herself perceived her position within the
campaign that mobilized her exile network. Reading her Jurnal, one is astonished by the busy daily rhythm of her work at RFE, which included the reading of the latest books, attending theatre performances, cinema evenings, art
festivals, museum visits, writing reviews for the weekly broadcasts and organizing round tables with Romanian and French guests. These activities were
punctuated by frequent phone calls, messages, visits, meetings, evenings out
with people to exchange information and to double check news items so that
they can be transmitted to the press or to the radio, organizing effective political reactions, and thinking on strategies for media attacks. Daily contacts with
the network took up a significant part of her time. Romanian intellectuals
visiting Paris, possibly looking for political asylum, and French editors and
journalists working on Romanian affairs were on her daily agenda, and demanded her attention in cases of emergency. She updated her information on
Romanian life with subscriptions to the press and receiving by mail books,
coded postcards, letters, and tapes. She often got her information through
telephone, or through visitors who transmitted messages that needed to be
checked against a second source.
Lovinescu soon acquired in Paris a reputation that no longer depended on
her fathers fame. She had contacts with all the Romanian exile communities
and all age groups, but she felt closest to the interwar generation, which continued to maintain the prestige it acquired before World War II. Most visible
and influential in her network were the older exiles, individuals who left Romania before and during the war or right before the communist regime acquired power. In Paris she reconnected with Eugne Ionesco and his wife,
who were her fathers neighbors in Bucharest; Stefan Lupascu, the philosopher, quickly became a close friend when she brought messages and recommendations from mutual Romanian friends, such as his cousin Lili Teodoreanu and the sisters Cella and Henrietta Delavrancea; Mircea Eliade and
his wife Christinel became close friends, especially after she married Ierunca, who edited exile reviews supported by Eliade; she met Emil Cioran in
France and maintained a close relationship with him until the end of his life;
Ieruncas Romanian French teacher, Luc Badescu, was teaching French literature at the Sorbonne when she met and befriended him. Little by little,
she also established connections with French intellectuals through Romanian mediators. As a translator of Romanian memoirs about escapes from
293
camps and communist prisons, she came to know French publishers and
started to work with the editor Christiane Fourni, who became a lifelong
friend. Working at the Encyclopedia Quillet, Fourni knew Marthe Robert,
Gaetan Picon, Clara Malraux, Mans Sperber, and others, to whom she introduced Lovinescu. Through her work in the theater, as a literary agent
(with a well-connected friend, Rainer Biemel), and at Radio Paris, Lovinescu
established contacts with a broad segment of the French cultural establishment.
As more Romanian exiled writers and intellectuals arrived in Paris, Lovinescu enlarged her network. The new members included the Turcologist
Mihnea Berindei (recently accused of collaborating with the Securitate in
exile), the writer Paul Goma, whom she helped leave the country in 1977 after
extended persecutions, as well as Dorin Tudoran and Bujor Nedelcovici. The
newcomers had more contacts at home, and were able to help intervene in
cases of humanitarian need. The heads of the Romanian unit at RFE, Nol
Bernard, then Mihai Cismarescu, and finally Vlad Georgescu, were also involved in network activities. Marie-France, daughter of Eugne Ionescu,
Rodica Iulian, Oana Orlea and others were also connected on a near daily
basis, exchanging news, information, and documents, procuring books and
articles, and shipping materials to and from Romania.
Lovinescus life was a permanent interplay between remembrances of the
country she left without suspecting that her move was irreversible, and her
life in France, which she perceived as temporary. Daily connections with Romania allowed Lovinescu to recreate her country and breathing space within
her Parisian setting: Updated with everything that takes place, reading everything, meeting everybody, we are actually living in Bucharest [] and return
to France where I hardly exist ( Jurnal 1: 114). When she felt she must take a
break and leave the city, the reason was the obsessive image of Bucharest,
rather than her Parisian environment: actually I dont want to leave Paris so
much, but the Bucharest nightmare with direct echo in Buttes-Chaumont
( Jurnal 1: 198). However, her meetings with friends could also revive shared
memories in the relaxed atmosphere of a real Bucharest coffee shop in the
middle of Parisian hot weather ( Jurnal 1: 239). In such moments, Parisian
exile felt like being in Romania.
Lovinescu minutely described in her memoir and journals the networks
structure and function. The most difficult task was to overcome Romanian
censorship on information, to get it updated, and to maintain reliable sources
at home. Since the regular channels of communication (post, phone calls, telegrams) were usually under surveillance and censorship, new strategies of
communication had to be introduced, first of all via encoding: certain ex-
294
pressions or words signaled potential threats (arrest or trial) or a crisis that

asked for mobilization and help from the network abroad. One dissident, for
instance, wrote a postcard that he cannot drink coffee and has to visit a doctor. This was decoded in Paris as a request that foreign journalists should no
longer be sent to him since the Securitate started to interrogate him.
Information was usually brought by those who were allowed to travel
abroad, a few highly selected and surveilled individuals. Most of the time they
traveled in pairs to keep an eye on each other, and they had to give accounts
back home on every meeting during their trip. Usually these were internationally recognized artists and intellectuals attending international meetings as
Romanias representatives; their return was safeguarded by keeping their
family at home. This was the case of Dan Haulica, President of the International Association of Art Critics, film director Lucian Pintilie, and other artists invited to perform and work abroad. During their frequent travels they invariably called or met Lovinescu to update her on the cultural inside stories of
Romania. Some writers and intellectuals came, for a single conference or on a
one-time scholarship, without knowing whether they could ever leave Romania again. Those who decided to use this one-time opportunity to ask for a
political asylum received support from the network, which provided Western
authorities with information on the persecution of Romanian writers and intellectuals. The writers Maria Mailat and Bujor Nedelcovici, the critic Lucian
Raicu and his wife, Sonia Larian were invited to participate in RFE round
tables and interviews. Those wanting to return to Romania usually avoided
meetings or discussions with the exile network, but there were also exceptions, such as Mihai Botez, who later suffered retaliations.
A second category of informants consisted of foreigners traveling to Romania, and foreign university lecturers or researchers who became friends
with Romanian dissidents and shipped materials and information in their personal luggage. This was risky, as the border police and the Securitate often discovered them and, apart from confiscating the materials, interrogated and
even tortured them. When the French lecturer Romain Rchon was caught
with documents of Luca Pitus and Dan Petrescus from the Iasi Dialog group,
both he and members of the group were beaten. Another French lecturer,
Thomas Bazin, befriended with members of the same Dialog group, especially with Luca Pitu and Alexandru Calinescu, and was constantly under
the supervision of the Securitate. Italian lecturer Anna Alassio transmitted the
special code to be used to decode intercepted phone calls; the code was later
used to determine when RFE should start broadcasting a letter of protest
meant to determine the approval of departure of Liviu Cangeopol, a Romanian writer and dissident. She also transported a set of tapes on which Dan Pet-
295
rescu recorded his manuscripts for publication abroad. The most secure
method was to use Western diplomatic personnel who could ship materials
through special channels of the foreign mission.
When information about a case reached Lovinescu, she first had to double
check it according to the strict rules at RFE. The US State Department often
overruled internal decisions due to certain diplomatic agreements between
Romania and US. If the information was considered reliable, but could not be
confirmed by an official source, the network leaked the information to the international media, so that RFE could indirectly refer to the media reports.
The strategy of communication varied from case to case. The list of contacts included foreign journalists, scholars, diplomats, French officials and organizations. The main organizers were Berindei, who had extended contacts
in the French media, and Sanda Stolojan, the former official Romanian translator working for French presidents from De Gaulle to Mitterand, who had
connections in political and diplomatic circles, Marie France Ionesco, who
was connected with the world of publishing, and Paul Goma, exile writer (see
Marcel Cornis-Popes article on him in this volume), to name a few. The network helped publish manuscripts of writers persecuted in Romania, and of
political refugees looking for public attention.
The network also had connections at the important publishers Gallimard,
Flammarion, Payot, and Albin Michel: Alain Paruit, son of a Transylvanianborn doctor and a French mother, worked for Gallimard as a Romanian translator; Goma coordinated the series Est / Ouest at Albin Michel, Virgil Tanase
worked as a lector at Flammarion, and Bujor Nedelcovici, who had published
Le Second messager (1985) at Albin Michel before leaving Romania, became an
editor at Esprit. Apart from arranging book translations and publications with
reputable publishers, Lovinescu publicized recently published Romanian
works via RFE, usually as a follow-up to her reports on the persecution of the
writer in Romania. By publicizing new writers, Lovinescu came to be known
as creator of reputations. If a writer was presented and discussed at RFE,
and possibly in the foreign media as well, this could give him or her a new
lease on life: if still in Romania, the publicity could force the authorities to let
the dissident leave the country, if already in France, it could secure a place for
the writer in the French media.
If a case was severe, foreign journalists were sent to contact and check, as well
as interview the writer. Some of them requested such help from abroad when all
internal possibilities were exhausted and their situation became dangerous.
French, Belgian, Swiss, or U.S. journalists already familiar with Romania and the
communist regime, often through information from Lovinescu and Berindei,
usually responded to such requests. As long as Romania granted visas for
296
foreign journalists, interviewing individuals was possible, although the Securitate usually monitored the foreigners to identify their contacts and itinerary.
Once such visas were abolished, journalists had to travel as tourists, trying to
hide their true purpose and activity. They risked not only the confiscation of
their materials but also beatings and imprisonment, as it happened to Bernard
Poulet, whose mission was to check the situation of Vasile Paraschiv, a former
political convict persecuted by the Securitate. When journalists returned from
Romania with the needed information, they widely publicized it in the Western,
especially the French, media, alerting the major TV and radio stations (e.g., BBC
and Radio Paris) as well as the press (e.g. Liberation and Figaro).
In important cases, the action moved from publicity to signature collecting,
street demonstrations, public protests (especially in front of the Romanian institutions in Paris), and the mobilization of international human rights organizations as well as of Romanian exile groups such as the Liga pentru Drepturile
Omului (The League for the Defense of Human Rights), the Casa Romna
(The Romanian House), and the Centrul de Cercetari Romne (Romanian
Studies Center).
The Romanian authorities usually reacted predictably, proving the effectiveness of the network: the persons in question were released from prison,
freed of Securitate surveillance, permitted to publish again, and readmitted
into their professional organizations. They were allowed to travel or even to
leave the country. When a radio broadcast reported that the Romanian authorities stopped distributing one of Pintilies films and forbade showing those
of Mircea Daneliucs, the works were released. As a result of campaigns, the
persecuted political dissidents Father Gheorghe Calciu, Dan Petrescu, and
Dorin Tudoran, were released. The effectiveness and rapidity of such protests
increased the reputation of the organizers, especially of Lovinescu and Ieruncas, who were prominent through their activity at RFE. The following longer
account of the campaign to help Dorin Tudoran leave the country should illuminate how such campaigns functioned.
4. Lovinescu and the Network in Action: the Tudoran Case

In Romania, dissidence was individual and rare, in contrast to groups or
movements in Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Translator and dissident Doina Cornea, or the writers Dorin Tudoran and Paul Goma had only
a small following; the anti-communist reaction was naturally much stronger in
the exile community. The Romanian regime, with its Secret Police and legal
system, was well equipped to repress or even annihilate revolt and dissent, so
297
that the chances of group resistance supported by internal forces alone were
close to nil. Hence institutions such as the RFE were crucial in creating a critical mass for collective actions.
Dorin Tudoran, a well-known poet, started his dissidence by resigning in
1981 from the Party and from the leadership of the Romanian Writers Union.
He was immediately forbidden to publish and to leave the country. He started
sending texts to RFE for broadcasting and publishing abroad, and demanded
that he be allowed to leave the country. The literary network used here several
strategies. French PEN Club admitted Tudoran (possibly with Gomas help)
and invited him for a visit. He was also invited to Heidelberg through a Romanian connection in Germany. Furthermore, Lovinescu discussed his case
in her chronicle at RFE. When Tudorans PEN Club membership became
known in Romania, he was allowed to publish, but remained jobless and still
forbidden to travel.
The case received much attention in the West. Upon Lovinescus urgings, an
article on Tudoran appeared in Le Monde, while Bernard Poulet and Bernard
Guetta included the case in their articles about Romania in Le Matin and Le
Monde. By becoming a public figure abroad, Tudoran managed to improve his
situation at home, but the aggravated authorities threatened him with a trial and
possible jail sentence. In response, Tudoran requested more international publicity on his case, and Lovinescu and Ierunca convinced the RFE headquarters
in Munich to allow for more broadcasting time on it. The Agence France Press
sent out telegrams with materials about him, and it also distributed Tudorans
statements on Ceausescus dictatorship, which were immediately broadcast
by RFE. Tudoran continued to send materials to LAlternative and Ethos, while
Le Monde continued to report on his case. Similarly, Lovinescu continued
broadcasting chronicles on Tudoran, and criticizing the lack of solidarity
and growing isolation to which he was condemned by the Romanian writers
home.
When the PEN-Club invitation was delayed, Tudoran applied for immigration to the US, and he took his protest to the next level by giving a telephone interview to Radio Suisse Romande on Romanias controversial Danube-Black Sea Channel project, and he lambasted the entire system.
Lovinescu and Berindei distributed this to the French press through Libration. Tudoran finally received his US visa. When he received subsequently
death threats by phone, he immediately communicated these through Bujor
Nedelcovici and other friends to the network, in order to publicize them at
RFE. Berindei sent the Tudoran files with an introduction to France Presse
and Le Monde, while Lovinescu distributed them to RFE in order to devote
more attention to this case. Lovinescus broadcast chronicles on Tudorans
298
case were published in LAlternative, and this kept the topic current for the
wider public in the international press.
On April 15, 1985, Tudoran started a hunger strike to obtain the passport
he had applied for a year earlier. Reacting to this piece of news, RFE director
Vlad Georgescu decided to broadcast daily on the Tudoran case, while Berindei, who handled the communication with the press, contacted journalists
from Le Monde, Libration, and other papers. Lovinescu got in touch with the
newspaper Libre Belgique and with William Heinzer, a journalist at Radio
Suisse Romande who had previously interviewed Tudoran and now rebroadcasted sections of the interview with older relevant materials. Communication with Tudoran was by that time difficult because phone calls with him
were interrupted. Goma contacted Le Quotidien and involved the French PEN
Club; Marie France Ionesco and Sanda Stolojan drafted the protest of the
League for the Defense of Human Rights in Romania and collected signatures
of famous writers and intellectuals abroad, such as Eugne Ionesco, Andr
Glucksmann, Antonn Liehm, Cornelius Castoriadis, Pierre Hassner, Natalya
Gorbanevskaya, Micha Heller, Konstanty Jelenski, and Aleksandar Smolar.
From his position as the president of the League, Berindei sent the signatures
with a telegram of protest to Ceausescu.
When the US headquarters of RFE temporarily prohibited broadcasts on
the topic because the State Department did not want to endanger the ongoing
negotiations with Romania, the Leagues appeal and the protest letter were
publicized through Lovinescus contacts in Radio France International and
through the Agence France Presse, via Berindei. The main targets were
foreign radios broadcasting in Romanian: the RFE broadcasting ban went on,
but articles on the case continued to appear in the Liberation, Le Point, Le
Quotidien, and Figaro, as well as in the Washington Times. The Nouvel Observateur
fired one of its journalists because of official Romanian protests, but he
moved to LEvnement and continued to write in the same vein.
As the situation worsened during the hunger strike, Tudoran sent requests
to foreign journalists to visit and interview him, but since Romania no longer
issued journalist visas, this had become extremely dangerous. Arielle Thedrel,
a French journalist from Le Figaro, convinced a Belgrade correspondent of
Reuters to see Tudoran, while a Nouvel Observateur journalist familiar with the
case also prepared to go. Tudoran communicated his request through the
coded message la mer reste tantt verte, tantt bleue ( Jurnal 2: 127), meaning that he wanted to be contacted by foreign journalists; he knew about their
coming via coded phone calls from friends.
The League organized a manifestation at the Romanian embassy in Paris
when the new ambassador organized a reception for diplomats. Berindei,
299
Marie France Ionesco and others distributed the Leagues Appeal for Tudoran to the arriving guests. In order to get around the ban on reporting on the
Tudoran case at RFE, a second protest was organized in front of the Romanian embassy to generate new media reports on the topic. According to her
Jurnal, only twenty-five people showed up, but Lovinescu directed the slogan
shouting, and she recorded it on tape so that she could amplify the sound in
broadcasting, as if it came from a bigger group. The material was later used at
RFE, and led there to a decision to rescind the ban. Using any opportunity,
the network tried to revitalize the Tudoran case: journalists at Libration, Le
Figaro, and Le Quotidien tied the Tudoran file to reports on Romanian news,
and the case found thus again its way to the International Herald Tribune and Le
Monde. RFE transmitted clippings from the Western press, and thus Tudoran
remained daily present in the news.
The final stage went beyond the network, when French MP Jacques Mallet
presented the case in the European Parliament, and the International Delegation of Human Rights in Frankfurt submitted to the Ottawa Conference a
list of human rights violations that included the Tudoran case. As a result, the
writer was promised a passport and he requested the network to suspend actions. After a forty-day hunger strike, during which his health was not monitored by a doctor, Tudoran was finally allowed to leave the country, in a bad
psychological condition. During the campaign, Lovinescu had prepared his
coming by looking for a job for him at RFE or BBC, by trying to secure a fellowship for him, and by getting him paid for the dissident texts he sent and
which were broadcasted, so that funds would wait for him in the US, his
chosen country of migration. Tudoran settled in 1985 in Philadelphia, started
to edit Agora, a Romanian exile cultural review, and became member of the
network to help in similar cases.
5. Concluding Remarks
Philosopher and editor Gabriel Liiceanu reportedly said in a conversation
that Bucharest should have a crossroad where Avenue Monica Lovinescu
meets Boulevard Virgil Ierunca. Their political and cultural criticism had an
enormous impact upon the Romanian public before 1989. After 1989, Lovinescu rapidly became part of the newly reshaped and mainly conservative cultural canon, and in 2006 she was awarded the Dimitrie Cantemir award for Romanian intellectuals in the Diaspora. As a gesture of reconciliation with her
country, in March 2008 she donated her house in Paris to the Romanian state
for the creation of a cultural center and she also established the Ierunca-Lovi-
300
nescu Memorial. On April 20, 2008, just one month later, she died in Paris. Her
remains and those of her husband were repatriated to Bucharest.
Monica Lovinescus writings have been published in Romania by Humanitas, probably the best-known publishing house immediately after 1989, the
first one to respond to the new situation, especially by introducing to the Romanian public previously censored literature and exile personalities. Humanitas published the six-volume Unde scurte (Shortwaves), which includes a selection of rewritten texts, broadcast at RFE between 1961 and 1992 (there are
also gaps and missing texts in the material that is currently stored, but not entirely catalogued, at the Hoover Institution), and a selection of rewritten texts
broadcast at RFE between 1961 and 1992. Her Jurnal, also published selectively in six volumes, was complemented by her two-volume memoir La apa
Vavilonului, which covers the first period of her life, namely her Romanian
youth and the first decades of her French exile, not covered by her journal. A
book of dialogues, some of them transcriptions of round table discussions
from the weekly French Scene broadcast, appeared as ntrevederi cu Mircea Eliade,
Eugen Ionescu, Stefan Lupascu and Grigore Cugler (Encounters with ). Finally,
the only novel written in her youth, which was rejected by several French publishing houses in the 1950s and thus remained a manuscript, appeared in a Romanian translation in 2007 as Cuvntul din cuvinte.
As remarked at the outset, the scarce research on Monica Lovinescu has
not yet gone beyond encomiastic appreciations, although there are plenty of
primary sources to start serious scholarly research. The impact of her work
was tremendous and many-sided, but scholars still seem to be under the influence of her authority and are reluctant to switch from hagiography to
analysis. The relatively short period since 1989 has been one of triumphant
homecoming. Dedicated to the reconstruction of the political profile and social impact of RFE, Alexandru Solomons 2007 documentary Cold Waves/Razboi pe calea undelor featured Monica Lovinescu as one of the main voices of the
Romanian unit. Apart from Ioana Popas M.A. thesis at the EHESS/ENS in
Paris on Radio Free Europe (1998), only a few chapters appeared on Lovinescus work, in books on the period, journal articles, reviews, and polemics; the
public is familiar only with her towering reputation. Her connections with the
Parisian exile circles and the political-intellectual context of her work have
been largely ignored.
A combination of factors contributed to Lovinescus influence in Romania,
among the French intellectuals, and among the French-Romanian exiles. She
started out with a significant social and intellectual capital that I tried to reconstruct in this article. As a central figure at RFE, she built up a reputation
with thirty years of broadcasting. She represented a symbolic bridge to a cul-
301
tural and social past represented by her father, and she personally participated
in communist Romanias affairs through her mothers tragedy. She inherited
ties with the pre-1945 intelligentsia and built new ones through broadcasts
and her help for persecuted writers in Romania.
There is one significant question about the RFE activity and Monica Lovinescus anti-communist discourse: partly based on her personal background
and political opinions, her anti-communist position seems to result from a
combination of personal conviction, the RFE ideological line, and the repressive communist regime in Romania. Still, further research based on the rich
RFE broadcasting and corporate archival holdings at the Hoover Institution,
as well as the oral history accounts of former exiles and radio journalists
should complete the profile of the Romanian unit of RFE, which has until now
been identified in the wider public mainly with one figure: Monica Lovinescu.
Works Cited
Baconsky, Anatol E. Biserica neagra (The Black Church). Bucuresti: Eminescu, 1995.
Barbu, Eugen. Incognito. 4 vols. Bucharest: Albatros; Eminescu, 19751980.
Bernard, Noel. Aici e Europa Libera (This is Radio Free Europe Broadcasting). Bucharest:
Tinerama, 1991.
Calinescu, George. Bietul Ioanide (Wretched Ioanide). Bucharest: ESPLA, 1953.
Caraion, Ion. Insectele tovarasului Hitler (The Insects of Comrade Hitler). Munich: Ion Dumitru, 1982.
Carp, Mircea. Vocea Americii in Romania (196978). (Voice of America in Romania:
196978). Iasi: Polirom, 1997.
Dry, Tibor. Monsieur G. A. X (Mr. G.A. in X). Paris: Seuil, 1965. Trans. Monique Fougerousse and Ladislas Gara of G. A. r X-ben. Budapest: Szpirodalmi, 1964.
Dumitrescu-Zapada, Constantin. Cetatea totala (The Absolute City). Munich: Ion Dumitru,
1982.
Flers, Rene Al. de. Radio Europa Libera si exilul romanesc. O istorie inca nescrisa. (Radio Free
Europe and the Romanian Exile. An unwritten History) Bucharest: Vestala, 2005.
Georgescu, Adriana. Au commencement tait la fin (At the Beginning was the End). Trans.
Claude Pascal [Monica Lovinescu]. Paris: Hachette, 1951. Romanian original : La inceput
a fost sfirsitul. Bucharest: Humanitas 1992.
Gheorghiu, Virgil Constantin. La Vingt cinquime heure (The Twenty-fifth Hour). Paris: Plon,
1956. Trans. Monique Saint-Cme [Monica Lovinescu] from Romanian.
Holt, Robert T. Radio Free Europe. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1958.
Jela, Doina. Aceasta dragoste care ne leaga (This Love that Binds Us). Bucharest: Humanitas,
2005.
Kundera, Milan. LInsoutenable lgret de ltre (The Unbearable Lightness of Being). Paris:
France loisirs, 1984. Trans. Franois Krel from Nesnesiteln lehkost byt. Toronto: SixtyEight Publishers, 1981.
Lovinescu, Eugen. Istoria civilizatiei romne moderne (History of Modern Romanian
Civilization). 3 vols. Bucharest: Ancora, 192425.
302
Lovinescu, Eugen. Istoria literaturii romne contemporane (History of Contemporary Romanian Literature). 6 vols. Bucharest: Ancora, 192629.
Lovinescu, Monica. Cuvntul din cuvinte (The Word within Words). Bucharest: Humanitas,
2007.
Lovinescu, Monica. Diagonale. (Diagonals) Bucharest: Humanitas, 2002.
Lovinescu, Monica. Est-Etice. Unde scurte 4. (East-Ethics. Shortwaves 4) Bucharest: Humanitas, 1994.
Lovinescu, Monica. Insula Serpilor. Unde scurte 6. (The Snakes Island. Shortwaves 6) Bucharest: Humanitas, 1996.
Lovinescu, Monica. ntrevederi cu Mircea Eliade, Eugen Ionescu, Stefan Lupascu si Grigore Cugler
(Encounters with ). Bucharest: Cartea romaneasca, 1992.
Lovinescu, Monica. Jurnal 19811984. Bucharest: Humanitas 2003.
Lovinescu, Monica. Jurnal 19851988. Bucharest: Humanitas 2003.
Lovinescu, Monica. Jurnal 19901993. Bucharest: Humanitas, 2003.
Lovinescu, Monica. La apa Vavilonului (By the River of Babylon). 2 vols. Bucharest: Humanitas, 19992001.
Lovinescu, Monica. Posteritatea contemporana. Unde scurte 3 (Contemporary Posterity. Shortwaves 3). Bucharest: Humanitas, 1994.
Lovinescu, Monica. Pragul. Unde scurte 5 (The Threshold. Shortwaves 5). Bucharest: Humanitas, 1995.
Lovinescu, Monica. Seismografe. Unde scurte 2. (Seismographs. Shortwaves 2). Bucharest: Humanitas, 1993.
Lovinescu, Monica. Unde scurte (Shortwaves). Bucharest: Humanitas, 1990.
Lovinescu, Monica. Unde scurte. Jurnal indirect (Shortwaves. Indirect Journal). Madrid: Limite, 1978.
Manolescu, Florin. Enciclopedia exilului literar romanesc (Encyclopedia of the Romanian Literary Exile). Bucharest: Compania, 2003.
Michie, Allan A. Voices through the Iron Curtain: the Radio Free Europe Story. New York: Dodd,
Mead, 1963.
Mickelson, Sig. Americas Other Voice. The Story of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. New
York: Praeger, 1983.
Mihailov, Mihailo. Ljeto moskovsko 1964 (Moscow Summer, 1964). Delo (Belgrade), ( January-February 1965).
Nedelcovici, Bujor. Le Second messager (The Second Messenger). Paris: Albin Michel, 1985.
Nekrassov, Victor. Dans les tranches de Stalingrad (In the Trenches of Stalingrad). Trans. Ren
LHermitte. Paris: Presses de la Cit, 1963.
Nelson, Michael. War of the Black Heavens. The Battles of Western Broadcasting in the Cold War.
London, Washington: Brasseys, 1997.
Papilian, Alexandru. Micelii (Mycelia). Bucharest: Cartea Romneasca, 1980.
Pelin, Mihai. Operatiunile Melita si Eterul. Istoria Europei Libere prin documente de Securitate
(The Melita and Eterul Operations. A History of Radio Free Europe through Securitate Documents). Bucharest: Albatros, 1999.
Popa, Ioana. Lintelligence de lanticommunisme entre litrature et politique: une instance
de conscration. Le cas dune mission de critique littraire, la radio Free Europe (The
Secret Services of Anti-communism between Literature and Politics: A Form of Public
303
Acknowledgment. The Case of a Literary Criticism Broadcast at Radio Free Europe).

Unpublished MA thesis, Paris: EHESS/ENS, 1998.
Puddington, Arch. Broadcasting Freedom. The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio
Liberty. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2000.
Solomon, Alexandru, dir. Cold Waves (Razboi pe calea undelor). 2007.
Tanase, Virgil. Ma Roumanie: Entretiens avec Blandine Teze-Delafon (My Romania). Paris: Ramsay/De Cortanze, Medias, 1990.
Urban, George R. Radio Free Europe and the Pursuit of Democracy. My War within the Cold War.
Wajda, Andrzej, dir. Czowiek z marmuru (Marble Man). 1976.
304
Chapter III
Individual Trajectories
Introduction
307
Introduction
We follow in this chapter the traces of five writers in exile. Each case is unique
yet also representative of a type, determined by nationality and tradition, by
exilic trajectory, and by a mental map that each of them formed of the world.
Other choices could have been made, and from certain angles, the group is
less than fully balanced. No separate article is devoted to a Slovak or a Croatian writer, and, even worse, to a female writer. The latter is somewhat mitigated by the fact that we do have in other chapters two essays on women: on
Monica Lovinescu in Chapter II, and on Herta Mller in Chapter V. Nevertheless, the imbalance reflects a general gender inequality in our overall pool
of exile writers. We were aware of this imbalance, but were unable to rectify it
because it reflects the present state of knowledge about literary history, which
only future research may readjust. A brief look at the Timeline in Chapter VI
reveals how serious the imbalance is. Prior to 1956, we found only a handful
of women writers who went into exile: Anna Lesznai, Sarolta Lnyi, Erzsbet
jvri, Kazimiera Iakowiczwna, Maria Kuncewiczowa, and Wanda Wasilewska before the war; Danuta Mostwin, Milada Souckov, Kriszta Arnthy,
and Monica Lovinescu after the war a meager result that compares unfavorably even with the pool of female writers in our region during the first half of
the twentieth century. No doubt, both married and unmarried women had
greater difficulties going into exile than men. Among the 1956 Hungarian exiles, two women stand out: Anna Kthly, a veteran political leader, who continued to play important roles in the international social-democratic movement, and Agota Kristof, who came to be known decades later as a writer in
French. Starting with the 1960s, the number of women writers in exile increased dramatically, especially by those who quit Czechoslovakia (e.g., Jirina
Fuchsov, Vera Linhartov, Zdena Salivarov, and Libuse Monkov). Future
research may change this picture.
Only one of our chosen writers, Milan Kundera, broke decively through to
write in a second language, though Witold Gombrowicz also made some attempts during his long stay in Argentina. They continued to write in their
native language but this did not mean that they continued to adhere to their
native identity. A caustic irony towards the national tradition is at the very
heart of Gombrowiczs writing, and a fundamental ambivalence with respect
308
to Hungarian society and culture characterizes Imre Kertsz, the only writer
in this group that did not leave his country permanently (though he stated
several times that he feels comfortable in present-day German culture; he
lives part of the year in Berlin). While Paul Goma remained in the native orbit
in terms of his preoccupations and his language of writing, he takes an unwaveringly critical stance with respect to Romanian culture and society. Milos
Crnjanski is the only writer in the group who returned home to enjoy his celebration as a national writer (a turn towards nationalism that is evident already
in some of his earlier fiction).
Finally, we note that none of these writers was swept into exile as part of a
mass movement. Though their departure from home was conditioned by
great historical events, they pursued a personal trajectory rather than joining a
mass exodus. Ironically and tragically, the only one to stay at home was earlier
part of a mass exit, the deportation to Auschwitz. Kertsz may not be formally an exile, but he has learned more bitterly than most exiles what it means
to be ejected.
Milos Crnjanski in Exile (Guido Snel)
309
Milos Crnjanski in Exile

Guido Snel
When Italy and Germany declared war on Yugoslavia on April 6, 1941, Milos
Crnjanski, then press attach at the Yugoslav embassy in Rome, left for Lissabon. A few months later, he reached London and joined the Yugoslav government in exile there. After Titos communist party took over in 1945,
Crnjanski did not return to Yugoslavia but remained in London until 1965.
When he finally returned to Belgrade, he was hailed as a great and important
writer and poet. He lived in the city until his death in 1977.
Was he an exile? The reason why he did not or could not return was, he
claimed, because he was told that he would have to spend a few months in
jail, because of his right wing publications from the 1930s. Thank you very
much, I told them, and left the government (Ispunio 184). The threat may
have been real, and he might have ended up in prison would he have returned
in 1945. In London, Crnjanski joined the life of the Serbian exiles (many of
them royalists and Cetnik allies), but soon shifted to the margins of a community that was itself already marginal. He may have expected more (financial) support, as he was convinced that every community should take care of
its gifted individuals. When he later realized that even T.S. Eliots poetry didnt
provide the renowned poet with an income, he expressed astonishment (or
rather disgust) with the English society.
Crnjanski, though careful to the point of paranoia, did not completely
avoid, however, compatriots allied to the new regime. By the end of the 1950s,
he occasionally met reporters and inquired about the possibility of publishing
back home. In 1956, his novel of 1921, Dnevnik o Carnojevicu (A Diary about
Carnojevic), was reissued in Subotica. The only censored passage was an
erotic one. Furthermore, when his long time friend, the former Vreme journalist but now a fellow migr Dragan Acimovic visited him in London in
1961, Crnjanski told him about one of his visits to the Foreign Press Association, in the capacity of economic reporter of the Buenos Aires weekly El
Economista. There, he meet Mosa Pijade, a prominent person in Titos party. In
the version of Acimovic:
310
Once he [Crnjanski] got a seat at the end of the table, among unknown Asian correspondents, the next time among world famous journalists. On one occasion, right after
the war, he got a seat opposite Mosa Pijade. When he recognized Crnjanski, he was
highly surprised. With his eyes, he [Pijade] gave him a sign that he wanted to talk. Later,
when they got together, Pijade asked him: What are you doing here? Making a living
as a journalist. [] Why dont you come home? Pijade continued. Enough about
that, Mosa. [] And they each went their own way (41).
Another version of the same anecdote took place at the Yugoslav embassy in
London, where Pijade apparently told Crnjanski: Why dont you come
home, you old fool! (Dnevnik 68). These are written versions of a story
Crnjanski was obviously fond of telling; the very difference between the question mark and the exclamation mark opens up two versions of the event,
whether budalo matori (you old fool) was actually added or not. It was Srd-an
Prica, Yugoslav ambassador in London, who finally succeeded in convincing
Crnjanski to return. In 1965, Prica accompagnied Crnjanski to Triest, and
from there to Rijeka, where Crnjanski had spent his high-school years.
So was it Crnjanskis own choice not to return to Titos Yugoslavia?
Couldnt he return, or did he think that he couldnt return? The famous or infamous mild censorship of Titos Yugoslavia allowed for a grey zone, which
often left it open whether a writer would be persecuted or not. One should
also keep in mind that by 1945 Crnjanski was more or less on the margins of
Yugoslav literary life. He had been abroad in the diplomatic service since the
early 1930s and hadnt published poetry or fiction for a long time. He may
have overstated his own stature and significance, and would have perhaps
simply been ignored had he returned in 1945. Or he would have gotten the benign treatment other writers received, for instance Ivo Andric, the former
ambassador of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia to the Nazi regime in Berlin, who
miraculously re-emerged in 1945 both on the literary and the political scene
of what was now communist Yugoslavia.
In the case of Crnjanski, biographers must rely on information that the
writer himself provided, most of it in interviews after his return in 1965. Even
worse, they would have to pore over Belgrade dailies and weeklies, which
every now and then wrote about Crnjanski but hardly ever provided more
than anecdotic information. A biographer who digs into the Yugoslavian past
like a literary archeologist can only dream of a firm biographical tradition as it
exists in English literature, where several biographies of one author add up to
a complex image of a writers life. Think of the now countless studies on the
life of the quintessential modernists Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, which
take contrasting views on the entanglement of life and literature, and of the
factual events in the authors life and the fictional ones that make up his or her
311
literary texts. When dealing with an exiled or migr writer, the lack of a biography is even more frustrating. As Leszek Koakowski writes:
More often than not, modern exiles have been expatriates, rather than exiles in the strict
sense; usually they were not physically deported from their countries or banished by law;
they escaped from political persecution, prison, death, or simply censorship. The distinction is important insofar as it has had a psychological effect. Many voluntary exiles
from tyrannical regimes cannot rid themselves of a feeling of discomfort. [] A certain
ambiguity is therefore unavoidable, and it is impossible to draw up any hard-and-fast
rules to distinguish justifiable from unjustifiable self-exile (188).
Whether Crnjanskis decision to go into exile was deliberate, a justifiable selfdefense, the result of a miscalculation or paranoia, cannot be answered here,
not even hypothetically. What I can give here are some questionable and subjectively interpreted facts about Crnjanskis London life, which, at least in the
version he gave in interviews after his return to Belgrade, bore the hallmark of
exilic hardship.
After Crnjanski resigned from the exile Yugoslav government in London,
he first toiled and moiled for some time in a bookstore, where he had to carry
heavy packages of books. He then worked as a clerk in the shoe store Hellstern and Sons, where he sat in the basement and watched the feet of Londoners passing by. He attempted to write a novel in English, The Shoemakers of London. In an interview after his return to Belgrade, he claimed
he gave the novel to Rebecca West, author of the acclaimed Balkan travelogue
Black Lamb, Grey Falcon, who approved of it and recommended him to an English publisher. But he then withdrew the book because he had apparently realized that it is harder to write English than to speak it. I can now see that it
would take me at least twenty years to become English (Ispunio 36).
Crnjanski lost his job in the shoe store, in one version because of a conflict
with the manager (Acimovic 50), in another version because his Achilles tendon tore during a holiday at the coast (Ispunio 211). The tendon rupture also
befalls the fictional character Rjepnin in Crnjanskis Roman o Londonu (A
Novel about London; 1971).
Crnjanski and his wife Vida lived for some time with Lady Paget, wife of
the former Viceroy of India and benefactress of the Serbian exile community.
Vida served tea; Crnjanski sat in the garden and wrote. Throughout his London years he tried to get an academic position, with or without the help of the
Serbian exile community. He became a student at the University of London
and got a degree in international affairs; According to one source he also obtained a degree in dramaturgy and film direction (Bunjac 70). Still, he failed to
obtain a steady job. As of 1952, he wrote on economy for the Buenos Aires
based El Economista, run by another Serbian migr. The wages must have
312
been insufficient: he applied as a porter with a number of hotels, but was not
accepted. They lived from the money Vida earned by sewing doll clothes for
department stores. When they returned to Yugoslavia in 1965, the Yugoslav
government covered Crnjanskis debts in England (about 500 pound sterling)
and sent him, at his request, three meters of wool for a new suit.
Though Crnjanski may not have been objectively an exile, he did live as one
and acted out the role of a poet banished from his home country. In the many
interviews he gave after his return, he never missed an opportunity to tell
about the hardships he and his wife had to endure. Although the actual reasons for his staying abroad may have been obscure, the fiction and poetry he
wrote in London, Kod Hiperborejaca (Among the Hyperboreans; 1966), A Novel
about London (1971), and the long poem Lament o Beogradu (Lament for
Belgrade; 1956), are monumental texts about the complexities of exile.
Hence, the remainder of this essay will not deal with Crnjanskis actual London years, but with their transposition into an exilic experience in his fiction.
1. Exercises in Homelessness
Although exile often presents a sudden and dramatic rupture, causing a writer
to undergo a total transformation (Miosz 36), there is remarkable consistency in Crnjanskis poetics throughout his oeuvre, at least concerning the subject matter. His obsessive theme remains homelessness, no doubt informed
by his experiences at the Isonzo and Galician fronts in World War I. Far from
an abstract sense of being existentially out of place, homelessness is for
Crnjanski the state of mind of a soldier who returns home after the war, finding himself fundamentally misunderstood and forever cast into the world.
This is already at the center of his first novel Dnevnik o Carnojevicu, which introduced the dreamlike character of the Sumatraist, a wandering sailor who
can be simultaneously at several places, like a psychedelic avant la lettre. The
poem Sumatra and the subsequent prose piece An explanation of Sumatra turned this individual obsession into Sumatraizam (Sumatraism), a programmatic, one-man avant-garde movement. The poem describes a state of
detachment: Now we are light, tender and careless; the prose text portrays a
painful road to it. The narrator returns home from the Great War by train and
travels through the region of Srem in Vojvodina. He undergoes now a sense
of loss, now of an all-embracing interconnectedness with people, memories,
and places in the world. Sumatra, he utters several times, the first time seriously, the second one mockingly. We dont know whether his sentiment is
sincere, ironic, or sarcastic. The explanation in prose is preceded by a mani-
313
festo that declares, much like similar avant-garde manifestos, all tradition to
be obsolete and hypocritical.
These problematic veze (ties or connections; the best translation would
perhaps be Baudelairds correspondances) between people, places, and events in
the world remain at the heart of Crnjanskis later poetics, also during his London years. In the first volume of the novel Seobe (Migrations; 1928), Sumatraism is extended from the individual level to a diasporic, national one. In A
Novel about London, the main character Rjepnin is driven crazy by the veze in the
world, the seemingly coincidental and senseless correspondences between
separate places and faces. Among the Hyperboreans, a hybrid text (essay, autobiography, as well as travelogue), is wholly based on correspondences between
Northern and Southern Europe, between the Arctic and the Mediterreanean.
And Sumatraism is the guiding principle of the poem Lament for Belgrade.
Crnjanski takes this homelessness quite literally, and often visualizes it in
images of wandering between two or more places in reality, history, or memory. And there are countless passages in which individual sorrow and grief
overlap with national pathos. It is important to note that this is already the
case in A Dnevnik o Carnojevicu, where Crnjanski places his heroes and protagonists into an essentially national context. His personal nationalism is, unlike
its nineteenth-century version, not triumphant, but bitter and disappointed. It
does not imply homecoming or a return to an (imaginary) golden age, but a
state of eternal wandering. And it is certainly different from the cosmopolitan
variant of homelessness that is, at least in the pre-World-War-II era, absent
from Yugoslav letters as an active, speaking voice, though it did exist on Yugoslav soil. dn von Horvth, for instance, was born in Fiume/Rijeka,
wrote in German, lived mostly in Austria, fled after the Anschluss to Hungary, and died, finally in Paris. He was never counted as a Yugoslav, but he entered its literature in the 1980s: Danilo Kis, who lived by then in an Joycean
exile in Paris, based the story The Man without Fatherland (Apatrid) on
Horvths life and tragic death; this then became a model for Dubravka
Ugresic, David Albahari, and other post-Yugoslav exiles in the 1990s a
tradition with which Crnjanskis homelessness has nothing in common.
In contrast to Horvth, writers like Crnjanski, Ivo Andric, and, to a lesser
extent, Miroslav Krleza still had a firm notion of a national home, whether it
be South-Slav, Yugoslav, Serbian or Croatian. Some, though not all of them,
would become renegades, but they did have a home they could embrace or reject. The difference between these national and cosmopolitan forms of
homelessness, can be illustrated by the stance Yugoslav writers took toward
their Jewish fellow citizens, at least toward those who were not assimilated.
These were kuferasi, suitcase people, as the narrator says in Andrics The
314
Letter from 1920. The term and the image of people living from suitcases reemerges among post-Yugoslav exiles and migrs, but in the 1920s, in the
years following the collapse of the Habsburg empire, it suggested a lack of
loyalty to the new South-Slav state that was multi-national insofar as Serbs,
Croats, and Slovenes were concerned, but provided no home shelter for Jews,
Hungarians and ethnic Germans.
Occasional hints of philo-Semitism in Crnjanskis work merely confirm his
essentially national understanding of the dramatic events during the two
world wars. A description of the introduction of racial law under Mussolini,
from Embajade, diplomatic memoirs he wrote toward the end of his life (that
were first published in 1984, frames even the Holocaust in terms of national
rather than individual fate:
Personally, these were hard days for me.
Already in my youth in Austria I felt connected to Jews and Jewesses, who were very
dear to me.
Apart from a number of Jews in Vienna who were more Austrian than the Austrians
themselves, I am attached, through memories, to those whom I loved, and to those Jews
who were my friends in Austria, and good friends at that.
During World War I, we Serbs were the pariahs, what the Jews are becoming these
days. (390)
The first of Crnjanskis three major exile texts, Among the Hyperboreans, is a
partly fictionalized memory of the days in Rome, written during his London
exile. The concept of veze is at the very heart of the narrative: the narrator,
who has traveled extensively in Scandinavia and the arctic zone in the 1930s,
discovers in Rome countless correspondences between Rome in Italy and the
Arctic zone. Bearing in mind that Crnjanski wrote this book during his London years, we note that it offers a peculiar perspective, that of an exile who
looks back at his last years as an expat, his social heydays. As the narrator repeatedly says, he was not aware back then of the hardships the future would
bring. In Among the Hyperboreans, Rome of the early 1940s is dramatic, not just
because it is a town on the edge of war but also because it turns out to be the
last place before the protagonists social decline. Here he still enjoyed all the
privileges of an expat. The story about Rome opens with a diagnosis that he is
gravely ill, and though this turns out to be a kind of sham, it allows him to have
a dialogue about death and immortality with such European predecessors as
Carducci, Kierkegaard, Tasso, Michelangelo, Stendhal, and Goethe. He can
pick quarrels with his direct neighbor Marinetti; as a protagonist, he can even
afford, existentially, to remain all but silent in conversations within his company. Our poet from a small Balkan country does not seem to suffer from an
inferiority complex. He is authentic and sovereign.
315
Whenever the protagonists is provoked by an Italian officer, suggesting

that the Slavs are inferior to the Italians, he answers not in the mode of a modern nationalist but in the older discourse of a proud and arrogant Slav who
observes the heart of Europe from the privileged position on the edge of the
continent. This is much like the spirito nazionale that urged the Dalmatian
Ivan Lovric in 1776 to respond to the exotic image of the South Slavs in Alberto Fortis Un Viaggio in Dalmazia (A Journey to Dalmatia). The pre-modern figure of a banished man of letters like Dante, Tasso, or Casanova is both
a literary and a political example in Among the Hyperboreans. The poet banished
from his polis: this is the status the exiled author, behind the expat narrator of
Among the Hyperboreans, would claim for himself. Casanova is also present as an
erotic example: the narrators manhood seems the unshakable fundament
here of an authentic, absolute masculinity. In A Novel about London, sex becomes for the exile Rjepnin the main field of cultural degradation.
Just how Among the Hyperboreans constructs this pre-modern identity becomes clear in a long passage in which the protagonist and his company take a
bicycle tour through Rome and visit the grave of Torquato Tasso. Pondering
the tragic fate and wanderings of the Italian poet, the protagonist suggests:
It seems to me that wherever Tasso went, his memory of Sorrento haunted him, whether
he would be writing poetry in Ferrara, Florence, or wherever else in Italy.
I have been in Sorrento. I know its intoxicating, enchanting, seductive surroundings,
and I believe that Tasso describes this in all his nature scenes. Just as Cames created a
Mediterranean of his own, and oceans that did not exist, Tasso imagined and relocated
all his crusaders, his princesses, and his loves to a Sorrento that was his own creation.
That is why he is unhappy wherever he goes. Thats why he cannot find inner peace anywhere. And that is why he wanders through Italy, like a fish cast on the shore in a storm,
sprawling in shallow water, in the sand, on the rocks (153).
Crnjanskis protagonist describes Tassos complex of estrangement and

homelessness in the terms of Sumatraism. Tassos wandering, his search for
the imaginary landscape of his youth, is much like the experience in Crnjanskis poem Sumatra, where red cherries from the poets zavicaj, region (rather
than state!) of birth, are reflected in the red choral at the bottom of a sea near
Sumatra: the correspondence is there, but the original is lost, only its images
remain. Tassos wandering is symptom of a being out of place, not bound to
any context. It is the homelessness of the protagonist in Among the Hyperboreans, one that he attempts to cure by looking for veze, correspondences between seemingly unconnected phenomena, for instance between Tasso, the
famous Italian poet, and himself, also a famous poet but from a minor tradition that is obscure in the eyes of the Italians, who have always had a keen,
avid political eye for his Slavic oltremare. The protagonists and Tassos disease
316
is both ancient and modern, and therefore neither of these exactly but rather
universal. The suggestion is that the exile of the author/protagonist in Among
the Hyperboreans is akin to that of Tasso.
Although I am not aware of critical discussions that read Among the Hyperboreans in the light of Crnjanskis exile, most major studies of Crnjanskis Sumatraism tend to respect its universalist claims. Like Petar Dzadzic, critics
discuss Sumatraism, at any stage in Crnjanskis oeuvre, as a philosophy, as an
abstraction from the text. However, as Crnjanski became an exile (or thought
he became one), his poetics of homelessness became embedded in a context
of acute estrangement. However real or fictitious his actual exile may have
been, his poetics, the core of his work and poetical thinking, came under the
threat of losing its universality and becoming the lament of a single man
caught in the golden cage of his language. And in the England of the 1950s,
Serbian must have rung only a distant bell, that of folk poetry, not of a supreme modernist poet. Hence Crnjanskis wish to write in English, and his
choice for a Russian and rather than a Serbian protagonist in A Novel about
London when his attempt at changing language failed.
This leads us to what is probably the central question concerning Crnjanskis A Novel about London and the poem Lament for Belgrade. How do they
respond to the threat of estrangement? In Among the Hyperboreans, Crnjanski
opted for escapism and flirted with the figure of an older, pre-modern man
banished from his polis, trying to pose as a Dante or a Tasso. I want to suggest
that Crnjanski did actually undergo a total transformation, especially in his
London novel, by facing up to the modern age, not just to the mid-twentiethcentury time of his exile but also to the place, England. Doing so, he transgressed the constraints of the national Serbian context in which he had up to
then been living, writing, and thinking.
2. A Novel about London

Edward Said shows in his classic essay Reflections on exile just how entangled the twentieth-century phenomena of exile and nationalism are. According to Said, nationalism affirms the home created by a community of
language, culture and customs; and, by so doing, it fends off exile, fights to
prevent its ravages. [] All nationalisms in their early stage develop from a
condition of estrangement (176). For Said, nationalism is not a premodern
phenomenon but one that is directly related to the existential discontent of
the modern age. Exile, the most extreme manifestation of this discontent, is
therefore irremediably secular and unbearably historical.
317
Although exile is terrible to experience (173), Said does see possibilities

for its productive use. The exiles position on the margins of the (most often
Western) host societies, may offer a unique vantage point that may become
fertile. In most cases, the position of intellectuals or writers on the border is
hazardous, for they are socially isolated and cut off from their native tongue.
Crnjanskis A Novel about London is about the double hell that the city represents for a Russian exile, the aristocrat Rjepnin: his hell is not only the English
metropolis, but also the exile community. Still worse, hell is not just the others
but also Rjepnin himself, personified by the devil. The novel is a brilliantly
written, huge prose text of almost 800 pages, which resembles the traditional
realist novel only superficially; it thus confirms Czesaw Mioszs adage that
realism cannot by definition be practiced in exile (37).
Crnjanskis modernity lies here in the narrative technique. Although the
main characters consciousness is opened up through a third-person narrator,
it is far from clear who this narrator is: he may be merely an abstract narrating
instance, or a voice that lurks behind the figure of the author, or a sane/insane
schizophrenic second voice in the head of Rjepnin. It may be even the voice
of the devil.
Rjepnins growing belief that his exile has brought him into a Gnostic universe where evil rules, will trigger his final decision to commit suicide. He not
only fails to build up a new life in London, he fails to come to terms with the
chaos of the modern world as such. His exile is, indeed, as Said says, an acute
and extreme manifestation of the existential discontent of the modern age.
The main question to be answered about the novel as a whole (although its
size makes this a difficult enterprise) is how Rjepnins failure to deal with modernity, first and foremost with Londons sexual morality and its Babelic
multilingualism, relates to the novels polyphony.
Crnjanski presented his London years, especially after his return to Belgrade, as a bitter exile, a dramatic version of his biography that some critics
have silently or openly accepted as the novels direct context; some critics discern the figure of the author in the novels narrator, others have gone as far as
to interpret Rjepnin as his alter ego. The point is, however, that although A
Novel about London offers a tragedy of Rjepnins life, it also is a truly modern
novel for it creates utter confusion about the orchestration of voices in the
text, to use Mikhail Bakhtins phrase. Traditional Serbian nationalist interpretations of A Novel about London find an authorial intention behind the polyphony, and thus offer a monologic reading, in which Rjepnins fate is absolute,
in which there is no place for irony, and which, silently or openly, confirm the
predominant role of the stradalnik, the martyr, in Crnjanskis biography. This,
for instance, is the interpretive strategy of Jelena S. Bankovics 1996 study.
318
Though tempting, this is misleading, not in the least because the narrators
voice in the novel is far from univocal.
I shall discuss a number of chapters that describe Rjepnins holiday in
Cornwall roughly in the middle of the novel, but I wish to focus on the novels
opening, where Rjepnin is in the London subway. The narrator complains
that the world can only be observed nowadays as a whole in some kind of old
fashioned planetarium (33). Then, discussing the shape of various European
countries on the map, the narrator comes to a terribly distorted picture of
Spain: As if God did not create the world. But the Devil. r. r,
someone shouted in my ear (34).
The devil. The devil, someone shouts in Russian, but who does the
shouting? Rjepnin? The narrator? The devil himself ? Is Rjepnin involved in
soliloquy, is he speaking in various alien tongues and hence mentally ill? Is he
mocking himself, the narrator, or human fate as such?
Two hundred pages later, Rjepnin is a clerk in Lahure & Son, a luxury
shoe store in Londons center, sitting in the basement and working overtime.
In the afternoon, he had a curious meeting in the park with an English nurse,
who happily declared to him that sex is at the root of everything and indirectly offered herself to him which filled him with horror. Leafing through
womens magazines, the narrator remarks now: As if some kind of Devil is
playing with him, he finds in the magazines he is reading by the light of the
small desk lamp, proof of his thoughts about the changes in London, English
women, love, and sex (229). Then, probably to unburden himself of these
thoughts, Rjepnin cannot resist picking up an illustrated magazine of a more
recent date. Meanwhile, the Devil still stands in the dark corner of Lahure and
Son, and picks photographs that confuse Rjepnin and, in the end, make him
laugh with horror (230). A bit later, the narrator becomes uncertain and says:
As if some kind of Devil, Mephisto personally (233). Either Rjepnin believes that an evil force manipulates him, or the Devil may actually be on the
scene and we are to believe that the he himself plays a role in the world of the
novel.
Such is Rjepnins confused mental state when he goes on holiday to Cornwall. He now gradually conceives of the events that befall him as consequences of a diabolic intervention, as if not only he alone but all of Western
civilization is put to the test. What exactly exerts so much pressure on him,
and humiliates him? To the reader, it is obvious that most of his suffering is
caused by social and cultural humiliation. His company in Cornwall is AngloRussian. Although most people come in couples (only Rjepnins wife Nadja
stays back in London), adultery seems a favorite pastime in The Crimea, a
little hotel at the coast, named, Rjepnin believes, to remind Russian migrs
319
that Sebastopol had fallen in the end (289). The central issue in these
chapters is the question whether Rjepnin will kill himself or not. On the day of
his arrival, when he sees the sea for the first time, he already thinks of suicide:
This was not a pathetic thought, no self-pity, no fear of life, but a strange,
foolish desire to sacrifice himself for his wife whom he loved and who loved
him (293). I am going away, the first-person narrator hears him saying in
Russian to himself.
The company includes the migr Krilov, a doctor, with his adulterous
English wife. Krilov sees everywhere what Rjepnin at this point only suspects:
sin, adultery, people obsessed with coitus. Another migr, Sorokin, has taken
his wifes surname, Fowey. Their attitude toward assimilation is indicated by
the way they use or avoid their native Russian in conversations. Krilov is passive, Sorokin defiant and arrogant.
Also part of the company is Lady Park, daughter of a Russian migr, who
is married to the aged Sir Malcolm, who despises all Russians save his wife.
One morning, when they all go swimming together, Lady Park, hardly an
adult, challenges Rjepnin to swim to a rock further out; he agrees and she tries
to seduce him there. Rjepnin struggles to come back, gets exhausted, and
feels aged for the first time in his life. He makes it back whereas the Russian
migr Pokrovski, who was earlier said to have a face like Christ on Russian
icons, almost drowns. Sir Malcolm carries him in his arms as if he had just
taken him from the cross (354). While reanimating him, they beat his body
as if not only water had to get out, but some kind of devil as well (355).
All this takes place close to the ruins of a castle that is said to have belonged
to Tristan, the legendary knight. Once Isoldes purity had been at stake, now
England itself is threatened:
In those days the papers were full of scandals that involved Italians who had come to
England looking for a job. The miners didnt want to hire them. Those dark-eyed, handsome young men seduced their women and daughters, poor creatures who were already
obsessed by those other new men, Indians and also blacks, who were coming from Europe, Asia, and Africa, looking for a job, something to earn, and were only successful
with women. It was all over the papers. Sex was at the root of everything that made it to
the papers. (368)
In passages like these, the novels polyphony becomes obvious. Rjepnin reads
a newspaper article that expresses outrage at the scandals caused by
foreigners; Rjepnins mention of poor creatures, for instance, can be either
emphatic or sarcastic, just as his comment on those handsome, dark-eyed
young men, although the sarcasm may express English views of foreigners.
In the last line Rjepnin focalizes again, signaling his own growing belief that
he lives in an evil universe. But there is an additional voice here. We are not
320
only looking through Rjepnin, we are also looking at him, and listening to another voice from a considerable distance. At other times, this voice is often
ironical; here, it doesnt judge Rjepnin but it observes him from the outside.
The vantage point of this voice is well outside Rjepnin and his fellow migrs,
as it is outside the exiles host community, England.
So where does it speak from? And where is the devil? Rjepnin considers the
possibility that the devil is a reality in his world, but we, the readers, dont get a
clear idea of his thoughts. If he really believed in the devil this would suggest
an escape from modernity and a return to a pre-modern world, where good
and evil (Christ and Satan) could be easily identified and distinguished. Following this train of thought, the novel would qualify as modernist, since Rjepnins perspective is one among a number of voices that display incompatible
views of the world. The alternative approach would be to interpret Rjepnins
perception as trustworthy and to accept the presence of evil in the universe,
the actuality of gnosis. But in my view, the presence of the devil is too complex
and obscure to identify in this text an independent fantastic layer of the kind
we find in Bulgakovs Master and Margerita.
Still in Cornwall, Rjepnin hears one day in the adjacent room Konstantin
Sorokin. His fellow migr turns out to be the gigolo of Mrs. Peters, a female
pilot and war hero with a distorted face. As Rjepnin gathers, she smokes during the act, and she exclaims in her ecstasy the name of her lover, Constantine! Constantine! But when he asks, even begs for money, she bluntly turns
him down. His compatriots humiliation brings Rjepnin to a conclusion:
So this was why there were wars in the world? This was why children were born? The Almighty had decided that it would come to coitus between that Russian from Tver and
that woman from Cornwall. And also between Sorokin and Mrs. Peters. Free will was
just a cigarette, even during the coitus. Dear God, so much work for the Almighty (384).
At this point, when Rjepnins fate has almost become a philosophical matter,
history and the historical moment return. Narrated time accelerates towards
the end of the Cornwall episode; right after having witnessed his compatriots
humiliation, Rjepnin, becomes a wholly different person (385) and finally
returns home. Several weeks pass while he is recovering from a torn Achilles
tendon. The accident happened when he jumped into the sea, which must
have happened after the scene, but before the last day of vacation and his return home. He returns a month too late and loses his job as a clerk in the shoe
store. What has he become?
A prince or not, what is Rjepnin?
No one. A displaced Russian. A displaced person, in Cornwall. Pereeenna
persona I can hear him mumble in Russian. (387)
321
He now remembers all the wrong pronunciations of his name, Mister Richpain, Mister Pin or Mister Richpin, and recalls that the Russian word
for dust meant also dust in the old language of Cornwall. (Everything in the
world was crazy) (388). Here we have another veza, evidence of chaos in the
modern world. That we are in the modern world is underlined by repeated references to London as a metropolis where races, colors, and languages intermingle. While Rjepnins understanding of his world becomes increasingly premodern, the fictional world of Crnjanskis novel grows gradually more complex and layered: it comprehends not just the Gnostic vision of the exile Rjepnin, but also the ironical possibility that his vision is completely wrong and
anachronistic, that chance and chaos, not evil intention, rule his fate.
3. Once more on Cooden Beach

Still in hotel The Crimea in Cornwall, the company plays a game, which
Rjepnin, who is reluctant to partake, easily wins: he fluently translates broadcasts from almost any Western language on the radio. No wonder, for he is a
Russian aristocrat raised by English and French nannies, who used to prefer
holidays at the Mediterranean. English society, though at this point still the
cradle of a global empire, is portrayed in the novel as philistine: it refuses to
open up to the otherness of foreign languages. As we saw, Rjepnins surname
gets so corrupted that he can no longer be identified.
Cornwall, more precisely Cooden Beach, was also where Crnjanski wrote
his Lament for Belgrade in 1956, which was published in 1957 by Dragan
Acimovics Garamond in Johannesburg. The reception of this poem, like that
of A Novel about London, was rather one-sided, for it read the text as an expression of nostalgia and longing for the homeland. The Lament, thats me,
Crnjanski once said in an interview (Ispunio 246), in which he also stressed that
A Novel about London was a work of fiction rather autobiography. Though this
seems to indicate that the poem had a supremely authentic voice, the statement becomes ambiguous once we realize the extraordinary shape of the
poem, which could be called dialogic or schizophrenic: counting twelve pages
but no more than 120 lines, each right page addresses Belgrade with Ti
(You), while the lines on the left pages address places and cities the poet has
visited, where he had lost or deceased friends. The left pages are bitter, elegiac, sarcastic, and carnivalesque images of transitoriness; the right pages are
exalted, almost hymnical. Crnjanski, who introduced free verse into Serbian
literature after World War I, is back to rhyme here, though on the left pages
these are certainly far from traditional:
322
Jedan se Leiche! Leiche! dere.

Drugi mi sapce: Cadavere!
Treci: Les, les, les.
[106, Italics GS]
A man shouts Leiche! Leiche!.
Another one whispers: Cadavere!
A third one: a corpse, a corpse, a corpse.
The poems right pages, devoted to Belgrade, are solely in Serbian and express
a craving for a clean, deliberately idealized Belgrade. The poems multilingualism is restricted to verses on the left pages, which are associated with
chaos, disorder, war, and transitoriness. The two do not get reconciled for
right/left page division continues until the end. The two sides are, however,
part of the same poem and of the same lyrical consciousness. Here, as in A
Novel about London, more than one voice speaks in many languages, all calling
from the past to the lyrical I. The tension here is not between irony and sincerity, but between elegy and hymn. The elegy speaks of the world at large and
the lyrical Is past in it; the hymn concerns a not yet existent magical place, a
locus of the imagination. As Rjepnin says in the novel: The worst thing was
that the question was not just whether [Rjepnin] should return, but where he
should return to (361).
It is unclear then, both in the novel and the poem, who or what the organizing force behind the voices is, and where it should be located. This is precisely wherein the modernity of Crnjanskis exilic texts resides: in the absence
of a stable, neutral perspective from which human experience can be observed and understood. What Joseph Brodsky once wrote about the life of exiled writers, may hold true for the life of Crnjanski, though it certainly falls
short of the complexities of Crnjanskis texts about exile: if one would assign
to it a genre, it would have to be tragicomedy (4).
4. Post Scriptum
A few years ago, the Embassy of what by then represented the Republic of
Serbia and Montenegro, unveiled a memorial plate on the house where
Crnjanski had lived in London. The article reporting (http://www.setimes.com; July14, 2004) said that a similar event was planned for Borisav
Pekic, another Serbian author who had lived in London. A genuine national
statement: we shall mark the traces the exile had left abroad before he returned to the homeland. Crnjanskis place of birth, Csongrd, Hungary, already had such a memorial tablet in both Serbian and Hungarian. But will the
323
Embassys gesture save Crnjanski from the fear of oblivion that is so obvious
in the elegiac part of his Lament for Belgrade? Although canonized as a national,
perhaps the national Serbian writer of the twentieth century, Crnjanski far
transcended the real and symbolic boundaries of the Serbian nation, both in
his life and his work.
In the recent history of the former Yugoslavia, forced migration has played
a major part in rewriting the literary canon. Self-declared Yugoslavs lost a
canon they had themselves created and supported. The new national canons
often do not welcome these post-Yugoslavs, while older exiles, like Crnjanski,
are put at the heart of the updated national canons. Apart from a handful of
writers, like Dubravka Ugresic or David Albahari, who have made a name for
themselves, cosmopolitanism holds more misery than splendor, and the fate
of most of these writers is or will be anonymity.
Yet, inasmuch as the literatures from the former Yugoslavia receive any international attention at all, this goes to the cosmopolitans; those that are
being read explicitly place themselves outside the national context. At home,
in their countries of origin, their significance is contested; other exiles, other
kinds of exile, are dug up from the past and placed in the beating heart of the
national canon. The irony is that the national and the international literary
cultures both cultivate simplifying readings. From a literary point of view, the
position of national writers is as hazardous as that of writers who are out there
in the market of a globalized world.
Works Cited
Acimovic, Dragan R. Sa Crnjanskim u Londonu (With Crnjanski in London). Introd. Milovan
Danojlic. Belgrade: Visnjic, 2005.
Andric, Ivo. Pismo iz 1920. godine (The Letter from 1920). Jevrejske Price ( Jewish Stories).
Belgrade: Narodna Knjiga, 1991. 5773
Bankovic, Jelena S. Metamorfoze pada u delu Milosa Crnjanskog (Metamorphoses of the Fall in
the Work of Milos Crnjanski). Belgrade: Nova, 1996.
Brodsky, Joseph. The Condition we Call Exile. Robinson 312.
Bunjac, Vladimir. Dnevnik o Crnjanskom. Belgrade: BIGZ 1982.
Crnjanski, Milos. Dnevnik o Carnojevicu (A Diary about Carnojevic).1921. Belgrade: Zaduzbina Milosa Crnjanskog, 1993.
Crnjanski, Milos. Embajade (Embassy). Belgrade: Nolit, 1984.
Crnjanski, Milos. Ispunio sam svoju sudbinu (I have Fulfilled my Destiny). Ed. Zoran Avramovic. Belgrade: BIGZ, 1992.
Crnjanski, Milos. Kod Hiperborejaca (Among the Hyperboreans). 1966. Belgrade: Zaduzbina
Milosa Crnjanskog, 1993.
Crnjanski, Milos. Lament o Beogradu (Lament for Belgrade). 1957. Lirika 100115.
Crnjanski, Milos. Lirika (Poetry). Belgrade: Zaduzbina Milosa Crnjanskog, 1993.
324
Crnjanski, Milos. Roman o Londonu (A Novel about London). 1971. Belgrade: Nolit, 1987.
Crnjanski, Milos. Seobe (Migrations). Vol. 1. 1928. Belgrade: Zaduzbina Milosa Crnjanskog,
1993.
Crnjanski, Milos. Sumatra and Objasnjenje Sumatre (An Explanation of Sumatra).
Lirika 28793.
Dzadzic, Petar. Povlasceni prostori Milosa Crnjanskog (The Priviledged Spaces of Milos
Crnjanski). Belgrade: Prosveta, 1993.
Fortis, Alberto. Un Viaggio in Dalmazia (A Journey to Dalmatia). 1774. Munich: Sagner,
1974.
Kolakowski, Leszek. In Praise of Exile. Robinson 18892.
Miosz, Czesaw. Notes on Exile. Robinson 3641.
Robinson, Marc, ed. Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile. Winchester, MA: Faber and Faber,
1994.
Said, Edward. Reflections on Exile. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge MA,
Harvard UP, 2000. 17387.
West, Rebecca. Black Lamb, Grey Falcon. 1941. London: MacMillan, 1955.
Gombrowicz, the migr (Jerzy Jarzebski)
325
Gombrowicz, the migr

Jerzy Jarzebski
Witold Gombrowicz emigrated from Poland in a somewhat different way

than the others who fled the country, although like all Polish emigrants of
the two last centuries he emigrated, to some extent, in the context of the
emigration of his great predecessors: Mickiewicz, Sowacki, Krasinski, and
Norwid. Many Polish writers shared the feeling that emigrating on the brink
of World War II they were following in the footsteps of the migrs of the
nineteenth century, whos fate cast them beyond the Polish borders, and this
state of mind was best expressed by Ksawery Pruszynski in his article Literatura emigracji walczacej, (Literature of the Fighting Emigration), which
opened the first Paris issue of the emigrant journal Wiadomosci Polskie. Nevertheless, the way in which Gombrowicz found himself in Argentina in August
1939 was of an ambiguous character: seemingly he got stuck in Buenos Aires
accidentally sent from Poland as a young, promising writer as part of a promotional effort for a new cruise line, during the maiden voyage of the new
Polish transatlantic liner Chrobry. The writers memoirs indicate however, that
he most certainly anticipated the war, and the fact that he decided to sail to
Argentina and stay in Buenos Aires before the German army entered Poland,
was in a way an act of desertion. The Polish model of emigrating in the
nineteenth century would rather have the writer participating actively in the
military effort, and absconding abroad only after the defeat in order to continue there the fight against the enemies of the motherland. Oddly, this model
does not apply in the case of the greatest authors of migr literature mentioned above (not a single one of them fought as a soldier in the national
uprisings).
Therefore, Gombrowicz could have perhaps ignored or hidden his betrayal
of patriotic ideals, or stated from the start that he was repeating Mickiewiczs
or Sowackis decision. But quite to the contrary, he practically declared his
desertion publicly in Trans-Atlantyk, the novel he wrote shortly after the war.
The protagonist, who bears the authors last name, sneaks off in the opening
scene the Polish ship in the Buenos Aires harbor as it gets ready to return to
Europe, berating the motherland for demanding sacrifices. The plot, as it un-
326
ravels, turns out to be just as scandalous: the protagonist defies patriotic models practically all the time: he tries to impress the Polish envoy in order to
extract money from him; he enters into rather suspicious relations with Gonzalo, the Argentinean millionaire-homosexual whom he promises to assist in
seducing Ignac, the young and innocent son of a Polish army major raised in
patriotic traditions; then he accepts bribes from Polish emigrants in exchange
for fictitious business assistance, organizes a false duel without bullets in the
pistols between Gonzalo and the major in order to lure Ignac to the millionaires residence, and so on. All of the actions of the protagonist-Gombrowicz described in the novel are outrageously unworthy and dishonorable
from the point of view of the patriotic tradition of emigration. The migr
was, after all, supposed to triumph over the evil prevailing in the homeland by
practicing virtue and remaining true to ideals. To make matters worse, the
novels Gonzalo advises Witold to revere, from now on, not the motherland,
but the son land [synczyzna] the erotic, alluring youth.
Simultaneously with the publishing of the Trans-Atlantyk by the Literary Institute Press in Paris, Gombrowicz started to publish installments of his Diary
in the Institutes migr periodical Kultura. Already the first of these ostentatiously attacked the model of Polish patriotism, which required a submissive
adherence to the motherland instead of defending a sense of individuality and
a critical approach to all national sanctities. This provocation drew criticism
from traditionalist emigrant circles, and cost Kultura the loss of many subscribers. Gombrowicz entered the Polish migr circles in the atmosphere of
scandal. In addition, his address about Poland, delivered for an Argentinean
public at the very beginning of his stay in Buenos Aires, was deemed an antiPolish provocation by the Poles in Argentina and so he had no one to turn
to, not even in his closest environment of compatriots. The story of Gombrowiczs first years in Argentina is told most fully by Klementyna Suchanow
(2005).
Gombrowicz spent the war years in extreme poverty, but he was unwilling,
or unable, to turn to the prominent figures of Argentinean culture for help;
from the very beginning he quarreled with the literary patron and Argentinean millionaire Victoria Ocampo, he was ill-disposed towards Jorge Luis
Borges, and sought recognition rather with the young generation, which opposed the literary establishment. Therefore, his strategy in Argentina initially
consisted of attempts to make a name for himself among local writers and
critics. Shortly after the war, he delivered a series of readings in the literary
Caf Mocho. The most notorious of these lectures, Contra los poetas (Against
the Poets) was a critique of poetry as a form of art to which everyone was generally indifferent, and around which, according to Gombrowicz, an atmos-
327
phere of mandatory veneration had been created. Next, the author undertook
the attempt of translating into Spanish his most renowned prewar novel, Ferdydurke. He went about this attempt in an original manner, by inviting a group
of his Cuban and Argentinean writer friends to join him in his efforts. This international group, which included some authors who were later to gain recognition and even fame (the most renowned of these was surely Ernesto Sbato, though Jorge Calvetti, Adolfo de Obieta and the Cuban Virgilio Piera
also came to enjoy success) followed a pattern of work in which Gombrowicz
would first translate a given fragment himself into his best Spanish, and then
his friends, according to his guidelines, would attempt to reproduce in their
own idiom all of the stylistic complexities and word games of the Polish original.
The translation of Ferdydurke was published in 1947 by the small Argos
publishing house, and though it was reviewed in several magazines and journals, it did not raise a wide or long-lasting interest. Today, however, some critics
and writers (Ricardo Piglia for instance) claim that the publishing of the translation marked an epoch in the formation of twentieth-century Argentinean
literary language. Between September 1944 and February 1945, Gombrowicz
published a series of eight articles in the magazine Viva cien aos under the
pen-name Jorge Alejandro, discussing the subject of the Latin-American
erotica, favoring the freedom of physical eroticism over conventional traditions of love-making. In October 1947 he took on the challenge of writing
for the vignette Aurora. Revista de la resistencia, which took a provocative approach to official Argentinean literature, and he also wrote and subsequently
translated with his young Argentinean friend Alejandro Rssovich the play
Slub, which was published under the title El casamiento by the music publishing
house EAM a year after the publication of Ferdydurke. This publication did not
raise any interest whatsoever, because the play artistically calling upon the
style of Shakespearian theater, Polish romantic drama, and Calderns La vida
es sueo was too far from anything that could be seen in Argentinean theaters
at that time.
Gombrowicz published the largest number of his works in Spanish in the
1940s. He published books, articles (under his own name and several pennames), he made public appearances, but all this had little impact on his position in the literary circles of Argentina. It was then, that he realized that without a strong support of European, preferably French critics, he cannot hope
to succeed with his works in Argentina. For some time, he harbored illusions
of continuing his career as a writer in Communist Poland. These hopes were
aroused when the Polish author Jarosaw Iwaszkiewicz visited Buenos Aires
from Poland in 1948. He praised the recently written Slub, lured him with the
328
prospect of publishing his works in Poland, and offered such opportunities in

his weekly Nowiny Literackie, all as an attempt to convince the writer to return to Warsaw. Shortly after Iwaszkiewiczs return to Poland, the authorities
closed down his magazine, and, as literature had to conform increasingly to
the Stalinist model, hopes to publish Gombrowiczs work became completely
unrealistic. All that was left were the Polish migr circles, which ran numerous publishing houses and journals and formed an important literary movement in the postwar period. But entering migr literary circles was also not
easy: as mentioned before, the publication of Trans-Atlantyk and the first installments of the Diary caused a scandal. For this reason Gombrowicz could
not count on the more conservative migr circles, especially those which gathered around the London-based weekly Wiadomosci. From this moment on,
Gombrowicz only criticized or ridiculed Wiadomosci and the literary and moral
ambience it sought to create. In this situation, the writer established a permanent collaboration with the migr monthly Kultura which had a much more
modern program, and was edited and published by Jerzy Giedroyc and a
group of his colleagues in the Maisons-Laffitte on the outskirts of Paris. It was
Giedroyc who published Trans-Atlantyk and Slub in the first volume of the
series launched by Kultura, the Biblioteka Kultury and later suggested to Gombrowicz the idea of writing and publishing in Kultura the installments of his
Diary.
Therefore, Gombrowicz appeared on the literary migr stage only in
1951, with the publication in Kultura of excerpts from Trans-Atlantyk and the
publishing a while later of the Polish version of the lecture Against the
Poets (Przeciw poetom). I do not include here the rather marginal text Witold Gombrowicz o swoim odczycie w Teatro del Pueblo in Kurier Polski, a
Polish migr magazine in Argentina, which summarizes the thesis of his provocative lecture about contemporary Poland. The scandal around the lecture
contributed to the closing rather than to the opening of Gombrowiczs way
into the literary emigration circles of Argentina. He entered the literary
migr scene as a late outsider, as well as a rebel and a heretic, for his fellow
authors had been publishing in Polish periodicals printed first in France and
then in the United Kingdom, USA, Palestine and other countries all throughout the 1940s.. His first publications in Kultura were an apology of the betrayal of the motherland on the one hand, and, on the other, an attack on the
most revered Polish sanctities, one of which was surely romantic, nineteenthcentury poetry.
During the following years, Gombrowicz wrote practically only for the Kultura, unless we count the publication of the short story The Banquette in
the London Wiadomosci. Most interesting for us is, however, the publication of
329
a commentary on E.M. Ciorans Comforts and Discomforts of Exile (1952), which

Gombrowicz had translated. This text is essentially a presentation of Gombrowiczs idea of exile, juxtaposed with Ciorans ideas, the meaning of which
the translator and commentator had, by the way, quite significantly distorted
(see Jerzak). It is Gombrowiczs wish to emigrate with dignity and without a
sense of personal failure, to the contrary with a belief that exile is essentially
the fate of every writer who must face the feeling of his painful standing out
of the crowd and his distinct otherness, constantly bordering on pathology:
It is very painful not to have readers and very unpleasant not to be able to publish ones
works. It certainly is not sweet being unknown, highly unpleasant to see oneself deprived
of the aid of that mechanism that pushes one to the top, that creates publicity and organizes fame; but art is loaded with elements of loneliness and self-sufficiency, it finds its
satisfaction and sense of purpose in itself. The homeland? Why, every eminent person
because of that very eminence was a foreigner even at home. Readers? Why, they never
wrote for readers anyway, always against them. Honors, success, renown, and fame:
why, they became famous exactly because they valued themselves more than their success. [] I would also like to remind Cioran that not only migr but all art remains in
the most intimate contact with decay; it is born of decadence, it is a transmutation of illness into health. All art, generally speaking, borders on silliness, defeat, degradation.
(Diary 39)
And then, referring to Ciorans words about writers who wither away from
their motherland:
Is it surprising than that these hothouse creations, nurtured in the womb of the nation,
wilt when out of the womb? Cioran writes about how a writer torn away from his people
is lost. If that is the case, this writer never existed in the first place: he was a writer in embryo. Instead, it seems to me that theoretically speaking and bypassing material hardship,
the immersing of oneself in the world, that is emigration, should constitute an incredible
stimulus for literature.
For, lo and behold, the countrys elite is kicked out over the border. It can think, feel,
and write from the outside. It gains distance. It gains an incredible spiritual freedom. All
bonds burst. One can be more of oneself. In the general din all the forms that have
existed until now loosen up and one can move toward the future in a more ruthless way.
An exceptional opportunity! The moment everyone has dreamed of! It would seem,
therefore, that the stronger individuals, the richer individuals would roar like lions? Then
why dont they? Why has the voice of these people faded abroad?
They do not roar because, first of all, they are too free. Art demands style, order, discipline. Cioran correctly underscores the danger of too much isolation, of excessive freedom. Everything to which they were tied and everything that bound them homeland,
ideology, politics, group, program, faith, milieu everything vanished in the whirlpool of
history and only a bubble filled with nothingness remained on the surface. Those thrown
out of their little world found themselves facing a world, a boundless world and, consequently, one that was impossible to master. Only a universal culture can come to terms
with the world, never parochial cultures, never those who live only on fragments of existence. Only he who knows how to reach deeper, beyond the homeland, only he for whom
330
the homeland is but one of the revelations in an eternal and universal life, will not be incited to anarchy by the loss of his homeland. (Diary 40)
This makes Gombrowicz a believer in a truly heroic dimension of emigration,

which means giving up all of the facilities to which writers, pampered by their
own society, had been accustomed to. This meant a revision of the kind of
Polish identity which most Polish migrs maintained: a traditional one, accepted and affirmed without questioning it. Gombrowicz constantly put forward uncomfortable questions regarding this ideal of Polishness, or rather, he
disputed the unconditional affirmation of the motherland and the wallowing
in the warmth of national collectivity. The first installment of the Diary in Kultura revolved around these questions, and the statements made therein have
entered the canon of Polish reflection on patriotism:
I once happened to take part in a meeting devoted to yet another mutual Polish cheering
up and support session, when, after having sung the Rota and having danced the Krakowiaczek, everyone settled down to listen to the speaker, who extolled the nation because
we produced Chopin, we have Curie-Skodowska, Wawel, Sowacki, Mickiewicz,
and because we also figured as a bulwark of Christianity and our Third of May Constitution was really quite progressive []. The man explained to himself and to his audience that we are a great nation, which perhaps no longer arouses the enthusiasm of the
listeners [] but it was, nevertheless, received with something like satisfaction that ones
patriotic duty had been fulfilled. But I felt this ritual as if it were born of hell, this
national Mass became something satanically sneering and maliciously grotesque. For
they, in elevating Mickiewicz, were denigrating themselves, and with their praise of Chopin showed that they had not yet sufficiently matured to appreciate him and that by basking in their own culture, they were simply baring their primitiveness.
Geniuses! The devil take those geniuses! I felt like saying to those gathered: Who cares
about Mickiewicz? You are more important to me than Mickiewicz! And neither I nor
anyone else will be judging the Polish nation according to Mickiewicz or Chopin, but according to that which goes on and which is said here in this hall. (Diary 5)
We should remember that the words The devil take those geniuses and
Who cares about Mickiewicz?, taken out of context, were used by the Stalinist Prime Minister of the Peoples Republic of Poland, Jzef Cyrankiewicz,
to accuse migrs of despising their own tradition.
Did Gombrowicz really turn away from his nation? Not in the least. He
mentioned the fact, that Mickiewicz and Pasek were among the authors who
influenced him most, that he writes in Polish because it is his language he
cannot write in a different one. In a way, he cared about the strength and vitality of Polish identity more than those who praised it; if he subjected it to
critical inquiries, it was with the intent to strengthen it. His literary stylizations
draw as much on the great Polish romantics, the gentry storytellers of the
early nineteenth century, and Sienkiewicz, as they do on Shakespeare, Calde-
331
rn, Dostoyevsky, Mann, or Proust. But Gombrowicz decidedly renounced a

model of emigration that was based on clinging to the memory of prewar Poland, and especially on protecting and conserving the prewar hierarchy of literary values. This distinctly set him apart from the circles of Polish migrs
gathered in London around the Polish government in exile, the Polish clubs,
and the editorial office of Wiadomosci. Therefore, those who formed the large,
organized emigrant communities in Great Britain, the United States, Argentina, or Brazil saw Gombrowicz as an eccentric and blasphemer, or, in certain special cases, as a renegade. Nevertheless, we must remember that from
the very beginning of his stay in Argentina he also had a few favorably disposed readers. Among these, he owed the most to the poet and essayist Jzef
Wittlin, who was at that time a distinguished moral authority in the migr
circles. Wittlin agreed to write the foreword to Gombrowiczs most blasphemous work, Trans-Atlantyk, a foreword entitled, not accidentally, Apology of
Gombrowicz, which emphasizes the intellectual courage of the novels author.
Nevertheless, the writer remained in conflict with the migr circles until the
end of his life, and in 1998 I still met some ladies in Buenos Aires calling him
in this tradition a snob and a poseur.
Gombrowicz was strongly affected by the conflicts with the Polish emigrants, but he also provoked them, or so it seems, on purpose, and staged
them in a certain manner. This was the case with the acrimonious exchanges
he had in Kultura with the writer Zbigniew Grabowski in Great Britain, which
lasted for months, or the debates with Czesaw Straszewicz, Jan Lechon, Jzef
Mackiewicz and Janusz Kowalewski. Most ostentatious and artistically subtle
was, however, his clash with Barbara Szubska in Wiadomosci a confrontation
in which many readers sided with one or the other (Gombrowicz, Publicystyka
20660). Szubska, an unknown reader of Wiadomosci, attacked Gombrowicz
during his polemic with Mackiewicz, accusing him of deliberately deceiving
his readers with the alleged depth of his stories; Gombrowicz answered, using
a vast array of styles and rhetorical tricks, posing now as a victim, now as the
grand genius, and then as a buddy an accomplice in the game.
This last discussion started with yet another of Gombrowiczs provocations.
While publishing after his return to Europe installments of his Diary, he filled
them for many months with his Interviews with the French critic and writer
Dominique de Roux. Alongside the installments of these Interviews, he also published short texts, describing on the one hand the comforts of a villa he was supposed to have bought for himself on the French Riviera, and, on the other, confessing that a certain mulatto from Argentina was on her way to see him, with a
child who was supposed to be his illegitimate son, and whose name he failed to
remember. Both of these mystifications went against the traditional expec-
332
tations that Polish emigrants were supposed to adhere to: the ideals of modesty
and purity, as well as the ideal of engaging in the Cause of fighting against Communism. This, above all, must have infuriated Mackiewicz, who took the Cause
extremely seriously. That an author, already acclaimed by the international
public, should be involved in a serious dialogue about his work with a foreign
critic, and should, at the same time, incidentally and almost in passing, provoke
and insult the feelings of his compatriots, must have driven most migrs up the
wall. And so, the practice of breaking the rules of decency and ostentatiously
attacking the commonly accepted ideals, governed Gombrowiczs relations
with Polish migrs from the very beginning of his time in Argentina up until
his death in Vence in 1969. This does not mean, however, that he was in conflict
with all exiled Poles. His discussions with Czesaw Miosz and Jozef Wittlin
were extremely interesting and filled with mutual awe and respect; and he also
received recognition from Maria Kuncewiczowa, Wit Tarnawski, and Pawe
Chmielowiec, not to mention the editors of Kultura. In Argentina Gombrowicz
also had a devoted group of Polish friends, the best known of whom were the
writer and translator Zofia Chadzynska and the painters Zygmunt Grocholski
and Janusz Eichler. But these contacts were of a rather private nature. The official relations between Gombrowicz and the migr literary and cultural
centers were tense for many years: he was seen as a freak, an attention seeking
eccentric, and an incurable buffoon.
Let us now examine the other side of the story, the relations that Gombrowicz built with foreigners, the ways in which he tried to gain acclamation and
present himself to the Others. In the prewar period, in the years of his debut
and first books, Gombrowicz did not yet have, it seems, a clear concept of
who he wanted to be on the world stage this is quite natural for a writer who
is still struggling to gain recognition on the home literary market. He took inspiration from Russian (Dostoyevsky), French (sentimentalists, Proust) and
English speaking (Poe) writers, and we will also find references to Nietzsche.
Excellent company, but Gombrowicz just as keenly stylized his novels in the
manner of popular literature: novels on growing up, Polish gentry prose,
romances, mystery novels, contemporary gothic literature, etc.
It was only in Argentina that Gombrowicz faced the essential problem of
presenting himself to Others, of gaining acclaim in the context of another literature and a different hierarchy of literary values. He accused the Argentineans from the very start of trying to be Parisian at any price and thus condemning themselves to being second-best, though they could benefit from
their cultural immaturity, criticizing from their point of view the degeneration
of Paris maturity. But, as usual, Gombrowicz started this campaign with himself, emphasizing in the Diary his own immaturity and its expository function:
333
If you hate acting so much, it is because it is a part of you. For me, acting becomes a key
to life and reality. If you are repelled by immaturity, it is because you are immature. In me,
Polish immaturity delineates my entire attitude to culture. Your youth speaks with my
lips, your desire for mirth, your elusive flexibility and lack of delineation. You hate that
which you try to eliminate in yourself. In me, the hidden Pole is liberated, your alter ego,
the flip side of your coin, that part of your moon that has been unseen until now. Ah, but
I would like you to be conscious actors in this game! (Diary 3637)
Soon he will add: I allowed myself to whisper to the Polish intelligentsia that
its real assignment is not rivalry with the West in creating form, but the uncovering of the very relationship of man to form and, what goes with it, to
culture (Diary 94). These words became a program for hundreds of millions
of citizens of countries situated far away from the Western cultural centers
well after Gombrowicz made similar statements about Argentinean intellectuals:
Even if from a personal vantage point some of them were mature, they still lived in a
country where maturity was weaker than immaturity and here, in Argentina, art, religion,
and philosophy were not the same as in Europe. Instead of transplanting them here live
onto this soil and then moaning that the tree is rachitic would it not have been better to
raise something more in harmony with the nature of their land? [] Sometimes, I tried
to tell this or that Argentinean the same thing that I often told the Poles: Interrupt your
poem writing for a minute, your picture painting, your conversation about surrealism,
consider first of all if this does not bore you, consider whether this is really so important
to you, think about whether you would not be more authentic, free and creative, by ignoring the gods to whom you pray. Interrupt this for a minute in order to reflect on your
place in the world and culture and the choice of your media and goals. (Diary 135)
And so, the first idea that Gombrowicz wanted to present to the world was
that the cultural leaders of developing countries should accept immaturity
and inferiority; this was an apology of barbarism as a culture-stimulating
revolutionary force that undermines the foundations of the existing order.
This revolution was to take place not only in the name of peripheral cultures,
but also of groups of people who were excluded or pushed to the margins of
society. Gombrowicz, with his homosexual tendencies, spoke also in the
name of tolerance for freaks, even though he hated being identified with the
gay subculture, and his admissions in this mater were partial, to say the least.
Explicit homosexual themes are presented practically only in his Trans-Atlantyk and even there in a grotesque guise. This, however, should not prevent
todays homosexual or queer literary criticism to see in him an apologist of liberation from the traditional, patriarchal rules of existence and social functioning (see Kuharski, Sotysik, Ponowska Ziarek, and Khl).
Another important enterprise undertaken by Gombrowicz in the name of
defining his own identity was an attempt to confront the great intellectual
334
movements of his time. And so, in the first volume of the Diary we find deliberations on Catholicism, Marxism and Existentialism. Gombrowicz, not a
believer himself, was intrigued not by Catholicisms doctrine, but rather by the
human beings involved in faith. He reads Simone Weils La psanteur et la grce
and asks himself:
The issue is not in the least one of believing in God, but of falling in love with God. Weil
is not a believer, she is in love. To me, in my life, God was never necessary, not for five
minutes, from earliest childhood I was self-sufficient. Therefore, if I now fell in love
(bypassing my general inability to love), it would be under the pressure of that heavy
vault, which is lowering itself upon me. It would be a shout, torn out in torment, and so,
invalid. Fall in love with someone because one can no longer stand oneself ? This is a
forced love. (Diary 174)
Further on, Gombrowicz considers Weils inner greatness, but also discovers
the flaws in this greatness, as well as an unintentional comical aspect, to reach
in the end an essentially Feuerbachian concept of God as a road-bridge leading to man (Publicystyka 277). At this point, however, the metaphysics of religion become purposeless. We return to an interpersonal reality, in which
there are no absolute values, and where a constant battle of everyone against
everyone else is fought, together with an undermining and revising of all concepts. Answering the polemicists who criticized his essay Against the Poets,
Gombrowicz states remarks?:
My opponents, if they had actually wanted to understand my position, would have had to
conceive of it against the background of the great revision of values that is taking place
now in all fields. What is it based on? On the uncovering of the backstage of our theater.
On the revelation that phenomena are not that which they would like to appear to be. We
are reassessing morality, idealism, consciousness, psychologism, history A hunger for
reality has been born in us, the wind of doubt has blown, and it is this that has undone
our masquerade (Diary 125)
Nevertheless, the philosophy of suspicions is also suspicious. Gombrowicz

does indeed kill the God in heavens, but he also comments quite contemptuously on Nietzsche and his superman, confronting the philosophical concepts with the low reality of Retiro, the port district of Buenos Aires,
full of transgressions but offering the delights of uninhibited youth:
It was enough for me to bind myself emotionally to Retiro for one second for the language of culture to begin to sound false and empty. Truths. Slogans. Philosophies. Morals. Religions. Codes. All of this was as if it were in another key, imagined, said, written by
people already partially eliminated from existence, who lacked a future the heavy
work of the burdened, the awkward work of the stiff [] while there, in Retiro, all of that
culture dissolved in some sort of young insufficiency, young undevelopment, young immaturity, it become worse, because someone who can still develop is always worse
than his ultimate realization. (Diary 144)
335
Gombrowicz, always siding with existence against existential formulas, sees

himself as a natural ally of existentialism. But to his mind, something is wrong
in this philosophy as well, as soon as it is formulated. And these oppositions
of his Diary between philosophical horrors and everyday reality his To fear
nothingness, but to fear the dentist more (Diary 184) are long engraved in
ones memory, like an apt joke. Gombrowicz goes on:
When you, existentialists, speak to me of consciousness, fear, and nothingness, I burst
with laughter, not because I disagree with you but because I must agree with you. I
agreed and, lo and behold, nothing happened. I agreed but nothing changed in me, even
by an iota. The consciousness that you injected into my life entered my bloodstream and
instantly became the life that now shakes me in spasms of giggles, the ancient triumph of
the element. Why am I forced to laugh? Simply because I also revel in consciousness. I
laugh because I delight in fear, play with nothingness, and toy with responsibility. Death
does not exist. (Diary 185)
Among the great philosophies of suspicion and doubt Gombrowicz also

takes on Marxism. But first, however, he identifies with its vivacious leftism,
based on an assaulted sense of morality and an awareness of social injustice,
its apotheosis of revolt, which any revolutionary artistic activity should sympathize with. However, Marxist magic ceases to work when revolutionary
power and terror appear, and, above all, when the demands of doctrinal purity
or adherence to the current party line kill the individuals ability to think critically and destroy individuality and authenticity the two most important pillars of Gombrowiczs anthropology (Publicystyka 300311).
Among the masters of suspicion and doubt, Freud appears least frequently, rather occasionally. This maybe because it is the psychoanalysts who
tamper with those elements of a writers psyche that are most intimate and are
not to be shown off, even if they are the most important ones. It is significant
that Gombrowicz is, as a matter of fact, most frequently read today via references to Freud and Lacan (see Beressem and Markowski). Nevertheless, it is
among the masters of doubt that Gombrowicz tries to find a space for himself, even if he attempts to prove that he is actually (thanks to greater consistency) a better existentialist than Sartre, a better Marxist than Marx, and maybe
even given his tendency to unmask his own buffooneries and his persistence
in exposing the unalienable urge of human beings towards greatness and importance a better superman than the one conceived by Nietzsche.
Such was Gombrowiczs self created image in the early Fifties, an image
created for the world, although condemned, paradoxically, to be completely
disregarded by it. In those years, Gombrowicz remained a practically unknown writer. Of the eminent figures in the humanities of that time he only
corresponded, briefly, with Martin Buber, whose philosophy of dialogue he
336
saw as very close to his ideas, but no enduring relationship came of it. Convinced of the timeless value of his work, Gombrowicz was unknown even in
his country because his books were not allowed to enter from abroad or published, was forced to quibble with Polish migrs over one blasphemy or another, and had few contacts on a higher intellectual level. This situation
changed dramatically with the political events that took place in Poland in
1956.
October 1956 meant in Poland a rapid opening to literature from the interwar period and the postwar emigration, which had until then been partially or
entirely banned. Among the classic publications from the interwar period,
Gombrowiczs short stories were published in Poland, from the abridged collection Pamietnik z okresu dojrzaosci (under a new title: Bakakaj), then Ferdydurke, Trans-Atlantyk and Slub and finally the play Iwona, ksiezniczka Burgunda,
published before the war in the periodical Skamander (1958). Fragments of the
Diary were published in magazines, and there was an outpouring of reviews
and commentaries about Gombrowiczs works. Overnight, the author became one of the most important personages of Polish cultural life, and thanks
to Artur Sandauer (see his two articles on Ferdydurke), the most active of his
promoters, also something of a yardstick, a paradigm of literary and intellectual value against which the countrys literary output came to be measured).
This success, which exceeded expectations, meant that from then on Gombrowicz, while remaining in exile, was more inclined to address the Polish
rather than the foreign reader which caused a temporary crisis in his relationship with Jerzy Giedroyc, editor of Kultura, who thought that Gombrowicz should make stricter political demands on his publishers in exchange for
his consent to the printing of his works.
However, the Thaw after 1956 lasted no more than two years: the first volume of the Diary could no longer be published in Poland, and the authorities
began to criticize what they considered as excessive attention given to
Gombrowicz. Several years later, when Gombrowicz went to West Berlin in
1963 on a Ford Foundation fellowship, the authorities organized a press campaign against him, depicting him as betraying Polish national interests. So aggressive was the campaign that Gombrowicz decided to forbid the publication of all of his works in Poland until the full text of the Diary, including his
reaction to the false accusations, were printed there. As a result of this (actually oral) last will of Gombrowicz, to which his widow remained faithful,
the next official publication of a work of his in Poland took place only in 1986.
In the second half of the seventies however, a publishing underground had
developed in the country, and one of the most important tasks it imposed
upon itself was to offer banned literature to the reader, above all the publi-
337
cations of the most acclaimed writers remaining in exile. Gombrowiczs work

continued to be the topic of many articles and books in literary criticism as
well as academic works. After 1958, when his books would no longer be published officially, his popularity in the country increased rather than fell. An
important role in the popularization of his work was played by the theater, for
his will did not include dramatizations. And so, most of the texts of Gombrowicz, who was highly theatrical even in his prose, found their way to the
stage in dramatized versions. Thanks to this, the author of only three completed plays (and one that he abandoned half way through) became in the
eighties one of the most often staged classics of Polish theater.
In the meantime however, Gombrowiczs position and importance in
Western Europe changed dramatically. He owed this advancement, above all,
to his loyal enthusiast, the prominent critic and essayist, Konstanty A. Jelenski, who resided in Paris and was possibly the most worldly of the Polish
migrs: fluent in four foreign languages, married to the famous painter Leonor Fini, and allegedly the illegitimate son of an Italian aristocrat, Jelenski was
a member of high society with many connections. He used his influence to
promote in France the work of his literary idol, which was not easy in reception?. He was aided by the well-known French-Swiss critic Franois Bondy,
who began publishing and reviewing Gombrowicz in his monthly Preuves. In
1958, Julliard published the French translation of Ferdydurke, and two years
later the novel was published in Germany. The sixties saw the publishing of
Gombrowiczs most important work in France and Germany, and editions in
English, Swedish, Italian, Dutch and soon even in Japanese. There was an avalanche of critical interest and when, thanks to the efforts of the indefatigable
Jelenski, Gombrowicz came to West Berlin, he was already welcomed as one
of the great unknown ones, worthy of respect and more than the average interest. Hence the numerous interviews given to French and German journalists, and the authors new strategy of action and of building fame.
The arrival in Europe was an exciting though difficult trial for Gombrowicz. In love with Argentinas irresponsible youthfulness, he had already
grown accustomed to his life in the rented room on the Calle Venezuela, and,
most of all, to his young entourage of writers and artists, who where only now
entering adulthood. According to one of them, Miguel Grinberg, Gombrowicz could have become in the sixties an idol of the next generation of debutant writers who published in the periodical Eco Contemporneo and formed the
militant groups Mufados and Elefantes revolting against their seniors
(4849). This, however, would have meant going back to the stage of debut
(as Janusz Marganski wrote, Gombrowicz was a permanent debutant), and
beginning once more, at the age of nearly sixty, a struggle for popularity in Ar-
338
gentina, where he was still a nobody as an author, and where hardly anyone
believed in his European successes. The advantage of staying in Argentina
would have been to live through a second youth, while going to Europe meant
not only reaping the benefits of his literary celebrity but also sliding towards
old age and death. Gombrowicz chose the latter.
Since Gombrowicz had arrived in Europe to build the edifice of his glory,
he needed to choose and follow a strategy that could grant him immediate
popularity. The chosen strategy was one of attack: in Berlin, Gombrowicz attacked the Germans for their Nazi past, masked by good manners and seeming good heartedness (Berlin, like lady Macbeth, all the time washing its
hands); in France, he tried to put down the beloved Proust, while praising
Sartre, who was for the moment out of fashion; he ridiculed the dullness of
the Nouveau Roman, criticized the artificiality of the customs, and even o
horror! of the French cuisine. At the same time, he tried to draw attention to
his permanent youthfulness and his being in tune with the latest trends in
thought. So, while he had previously and with good reason claimed to
have been a forerunner of French Existentialism, he now published a short
article, an interview with himself, outrageously entitled Jtais structuraliste
avant tout le monde (1967), drawing on the similarities between his own concept of man as created by form and the concept of man put forth by the
structuralists. On the other hand, Gombrowicz wanted to be seen as a nonconformist and he firmly cut himself off from the popular leftist ideas in the
late sixties, choosing for his main promoter on the French market Dominique
de Roux, a critic who defied the trends of the day and promoted in his Cahiers
de lHerne such writers as Louis Ferdinand Cline, Jorge Luis Borges, and Ezra
Pound.
Be it as it may, Gombrowicz became in the last years of his life that he spent
in France a well-known, perhaps even famous figure. Magazine and television
journalists sought interviews with him, while Dominique de Roux (1968) and
Pierre Sanavio (1974) each published a book of interviews with him. In Gombrowiczs lifetime many of his works were also staged, beginning with the famous Parisian staging of Slub by the Argentinean Jorge Lavelli at the Thtre
Rcamier in 1963. Gombrowicz was also played in Berlin, Mannheim, and
Zurich, and most importantly in Stockholm, where the Alf Sjbergs production of Slub (1966) was a landmark in the history of Swedish theater. Western
critics also appreciated probably earlier than the Polish ones Gombrowiczs later novels Pornography and Cosmos, which Sandauer was so opposed to.
In May 1967 the author received the international publishers award Prix
Formentor for Cosmos, and it was said that he stood a good chance as a candidate for the Nobel Prize.
339
And so, Gombrowiczs situation as migr had changed as if in a kaleidoscope: in the years 193944 he was virtually unknown in Argentina; in the
years 194448 he made desperate attempts to gain acclaim on its literary
scene, but with little success; in 1947 he finally began working for the Banco
Polaco, which had ties to institutions in his home country, and he tried to reclaim his position in Poland also unsuccessfully. In the years 195156 he
functioned mainly with outrageous and blasphemous remarks in migr
circles; after 1956 his position and importance in Poland distinctly overshadowed those he had in exile; and after 1958, particularly after his 1963 return to Europe, regular publications and stagings of his works in the West led
to a fame there that outstripped that in his home country, not to mention the
dubious position he held among Polish migrs. The seventies and eighties
were again a period of gradual decline of his popularity in Western countries
and an upswing of his significance in Poland. He became there a herald of
freedom and a symbol of highest artistic and intellectual values, from which
the communist authorities had cut off the public. Finally, the author found
many years after his death normality. In Poland, France, or Germany he has
become simply a classic, whose works are published in multi-volume collections, and in other countries they are gradually translated in full and staged
afresh. The centenary of the writers birth in 2004 brought many academic
sessions focusing on him, and new volumes of academic publications, which
number by now in the hundreds. In 2007 the far-right Minister of Education
tried to remove Gombrowiczs works from the school curriculum and
brought on himself such an avalanche of protests and jeers that it played a significant role in bringing about his political demise.
Who then was Gombrowicz as migr? We find out over and over again, in
ever different categories. In 2000, Jean-Pierre Salgas published a book in
France, which presented Gombrowiczs work as, no more and no less, a certain nucleus of European thought in the second half of the twentieth century.
Hence, as he himself had claimed, Gombrowicz would be a philosopher ranking with Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud among the philosophers of doubt,
rather organically associated with the Left, with such intellectuals as Jean-Paul
Sartre, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault or Pierre Bourdieu.
We have here a path leading from Existentialism, through Structuralism, all
the way to post-structural thought. Nowadays, Gombrowicz is read also
through the categories of Modernism as well as Postmodernism, and through
the lenses of post-colonial, queer,and Lacanian psychoanalytic perspectives.
All of these methodologies and many others as well are possible thanks to
the personality of the author, which was in constant flux, and engaged in perpetual games. According to Salgas, another important factor comes into play
340
that adds to Gombrowiczs importance: an increasing provincialism of the old

global centers of culture. As a champion of the, variously interpreted, periphery Gombrowicz becomes a philosopher and artist who is capable of addressing the core problems of men and women at the turn of the twenty-first
century. And the reverse of Alfred Jarrys slogan (Poland or everywhere
instead of Poland or nowhere ) can not only function as a chapter title in
Salgas book, but soon enough become also a symbol of this omnipresent return to the periphery. Let us end this essay with this paradox: if Gombrowiczs
strategy at the beginning of his emigration was to free himself of Poland and
Polish problems on a journey towards the world, then from Salgas perspective, the end of this journey is to expand Polish provinciality to the corners of
the Earth. And thus, emigration as a great escape becomes, as in the case of
Gombrowiczs writing, a double great return: to the world and to his home
country at once.
Translated from the Polish by Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand
Works Cited
Beressem, Hanjo. Lines of Desire: Reading Gombrowiczs Fiction with Lacan. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1998.
Cioran, E. M. Dogodnosci i niedogodnosci wygnania. Trans. from the French Witold Gombrowicz, Kultura (1952), 6: 36. Trans. Richard Howard as The Temptation to Exist. Chicago:
Quadrangle, 1968.
[Gombrowicz, Witold]. Witold Gombrowicz o swoim odczycie w Teatro del Pueblo (Witold Gombrowicz about his Lecture in the Teatro del Pueblo). Kurier Polski (Buenos
Aires) nr. 2845 (August 23, 1940): 5.
Gombrowicz, Witold. Trans-Atlantyk. Kultura (1951), 5: 1941; 6: 4761.
Gombrowicz, Witold. Przeciw poetom (Against the Poets). Kultura (1951), 10: 411.
Gombrowicz, Witold. Bankiet. Wiadomosci (1953), 16: 1.
Gombrowicz, Witold. Bakakaj. Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1957.
Gombrowicz, Witold. Ferdydurke. 1937. Spanish trans. Buenos Aires: Argo, 1947. Warsaw:
PIW, 1957. French trans. Paris: Julliard, 1958.
Gombrowicz, Witold. Trans-Atlantyk Slub, z komentarzem autora (Trans-Atlantyk and The
Marriage, with the Authors Comments). Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1957.
Gombrowicz, Witold. Iwona, ksiezniczka Burgunda (Ivona, Princess of Burgundia), Warsaw:
PIW, 1958.
Gombrowicz, Witold. Jtais structuraliste avant tout le monde. La Quinzaine Littraire 1
(May 1967): 5. Polish trans. in Gombrowicz, Publicystyka. 320329.
Gombrowicz, Witold. Diary. General ed. Jan Kott. Trans. Lillian Valee. Vol. 1. London,
New York: Quartet Books, 1988. First Polish ed.: Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1957.
Gombrowicz, Witold. Publicystyka, wywiady, teksty rzne 19631969 (Articles, Interviews,
Various Texts, 19631969). Trans. I. Kania et al. Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1997.
341
Grinberg, Miguel. Wspominajac Gombrowicza (Recalling Gombrowicz). Trans. Ewa Zaleska

and Rajmund Kalickia; afterword Jerzy Jarzebski. Warsaw: PIW, 2005.
Jerzak, Katarzyna. Defamation in Exile: Witold Gombrowicz and E.M. Cioran. Ponowska Ziarek, Gombrowiczs Grimaces 177209.
Kuharski, Allen. Witold, Witold, and Witold: Performing Gombrowicz. Ponowska Ziarek, Gombrowiczs Grimaces 26786.
Khl, Olaf. Geba Erosa: Tajemnice stylu Witolda Gombrowicza (The Mug of Eros. Mysteries of
Witold Gombrowiczs Style). Trans. Krzysztof Niewrzeda and Maria Tarnogrska. Foreword Wodzimierz Bolecki. Cracow: Universitas, 2005.
Marganski, Janusz. Gombrowicz wieczny debiutant (Gombrowicz: the Perpetual Beginner). Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2001.
Markowski, Micha Pawe. Czarny nurt: Gombrowicz, swiat, literatura (Dark Current: Gombrowicz, World, Literature). Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2004.
Ponowska Ziarek, Ewa, ed. Gombrowiczs Grimaces: Modernism, Gender, Nationality, Albany:
State University of New York P, 1998.
Ponowska Ziarek, Ewa. The Scar of the Foreigner and the Fold of the Baroque: National
Affiliations and Homosexuality in Gombrowiczs Trans-Atlantyk. Ponowska Ziarek
Gombrowiczs Grimaces 21344.
Pruszynski, Ksawery. Literatura emigracji walczacej (Literature of the Fighting Emigration). Wiadomosci Polskie (1940), nr 1: 1.
Roux, Dominique de. Entretiens avec Gombrowicz (Conversations with Gombrowicz). Paris:
Belfond, 1968. (subsequent eds. as: W. Gombrowicz, Testament: Entretiens avec Dominique
de Roux)
Salgas, Jean-Pierre. Witold Gombrowicz ou lathisme generaliz (Witold Gombrowicz, or Generalized Atheism). Paris: Seuil, 2000.
Sanavio, Piero. Gombrowicz: La Forma e Il Rito (Gombrowicz: the Form and the Ritual). Venice: Marsilio, 1974.
Sandauer, Artur. Szkoa nierzeczywistosci i jej uczen (Esej krytyczny osnuty na tle I czesci
Ferdydurke Gombrowicza) (The School of Unreality and its Disciple. Critical Essay
Based on the First Part of Gombrowiczs Ferdydurke). Zycie Literackie (1958), nr. 1. Rpt.
Sandauer. Dla kazdego cos przykrego. Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1966. 81118.
Sandauer, Artur. Poczatki, swietnosc i upadek rodziny Modziakw (Esej krytyczny, osnuty na tle II czesci Ferdydurke Gombrowicza (The Rise, Splendor, and Fall of the
Youngblood Family. Critical Essay Based on the Second Part of Gombrowiczs Ferdydurke). Polityka (1958), nr. 43. Rpt. Sandauer. Dla kazdego cos przykrego. Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1966. 119169.
Sotysik, Agnieszka M. Witold Gombrowiczs Struggle with Heterosexual Form: From a
National to a Performative Self. Ponowska Ziarek, Gombrowiczs Grimaces 24565.
Suchanow, Klementyna. Argentynskie przygody Gombrowicza (Gombrowiczs Argentinian Adventures). Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie: 2005.
342
Paul Goma: the Permanence of Dissidence and Exile

Marcel-Cornis-Pope
Paul Goma is the Romanian writer most marked by the Gulag

model, which he has converted into a veritable imago mundi. The
obsessive insistence with which he treats this theme could result in
a monotony of horror, exceeding a readers capacity to react to it.
Yet we need to think of his contribution differently, as a pioneering
impact of the Solzhenitsyn-type novel about the Gulag experience on
Western mentalities. His novels, like his testimonial literature have a
shock value. With the difference that here the author resorts to ample
narrative constructions, in which fiction predominates, though it uses
reality as its starting point.
(Cesereanu, Gulagul n constiinta romneasca 293)
When I did what any other writer (except a Romanian one!) would
have done, by sending my manuscripts refused in the East to
publishers in the West, I found myself avoided, isolated, quarantined.
(Goma, Jurnalul unui jurnal 269)
The case of oppositional writer Paul Goma represents both a recognizable

type for East-Central European dissidence and exile, and a surprising exception within his own country. In the larger context of the East-Central European oppositional movement, Paul Goma joins other major figures like Jacek
Kuron, Adam Michnik, Vaclav Hvel, Gyrgy Konrd, and Jurek Becker, who
spearheaded the drive towards the liberalization of socio-cultural life and contributed to the erosion of the ideological monopoly of Soviet-inspired communism. Already as a young man, Goma supported the Hungarian anti-communist movement (see below) and two decades later signed the Czech
inspired Charter 77 together with 34 Hungarian intellectuals and a few Romanian writers primarily from the Diaspora (the only writer at home to join
him was Ion Negoitescu). Concomitant with Gomas resistance to Ceausescus ideological oppression, came the strikes of the Jiu Valley miners and
workers in Brasov (1977, 1979), as well as the first attempt to form a Free
Trade Union of the Working People of Romania (SLOMR, 1979), which
Goma supported directly. The workers movements were crushed violently
and some of the leaders disappeared without a trace. Goma himself was
Paul Goma (Marcel-Cornis-Pope)
343
brutally beaten and expelled from Romania in 1977, while his resistance
movement subsequently dispersed. Still, his example encouraged a broader
civil-rights movement in Romania, in which writers and scholars from several
university centers participated: Bucharest (Dorin Tudoran, Ana Blandiana,
and Mircea Dinescu), Cluj (Doina Cornea in an interview, she recognized
the impact that Gomas example had for her own dissidence), Iasi (Dan Petrescu, Mihai Dinu Gheorghiu, Liviu Cangeopol, Alexandru Calinescu, and
Luca Pitu), and Timisoara (Petru Iliesu). Liviu Antonesei draws attention to
some of the parallels between the short-lived Goma movement in 1977 and
the actions of several groups of writers in 198788 that called into question
the monopoly of communist power (66). Some of the methods were similar:
open letters to the Romanian authorities and to the foreign press, collective
appeals and signing of international documents guaranteeing civil rights. As
Antonesei points out, the dissident movement of 1987 was somewhat better
organized and better publicized than Gomas movement a decade earlier:
both moments had a significant contributions to freeing people from fear,
preparing a pre-revolutionary state (140).
Born in 1935 in Mana, a Bessarabian village at the time part of the Kingdom of Romania and now in the Republic of Moldova, Gomas biography
epitomizes the main phases of persecution, dissidence, and political exile that
we have come to identify with the dramatic fate of writers during and after
World War II. After the occupation of Bessarabia by the Soviet troupes,
Gomas father, Eufimie, was arrested by the NKVD and deported to Siberia.
In 1943, he was discovered by his wife Maria in a camp for Soviet prisoners in
Southern Romania, treated as a prisoner of war. In March 1944, the family
managed to avoid a renewed threat of deportation and took refuge in Romania, settling in the Transylvanian city of Sibiu. In August the same year,
while targeted with other Bessarabian Romanians for involuntary repatriation to the Soviet Union, the Goma family fled to the village of Buia, deeper
in Transylvania. For several months, they hid in the forests around Buia but
were turned over to the Romanian authorities by shepherds working in the
area. While awaiting their fate in a Repatriation Center, Eufimie Goma
forged documents for his family, escaping deportation back to Soviet Union.
His brother, who refused to use the forged documents, was deported and died
in one of the camps. These early events are reflected in a number of Gomas
works, from Arta refugii (The Art of Refuge/Taking Flight Again) and Soldatul
cinelui (Dogs Soldier) to Garda inversa (Reverse Guard).
Paul Gomas early biography thus began under the sign of peregrination
and exile, with his family trying to negotiate a minimal home. As a Romanian
from Bessarabia, Goma was from the beginning an exile, both in his native
344
village occupied by the Soviets in 1940, and in Romania, where he was sometimes viewed as a poor and illegitimate relative by the Romanians: Goma is
an older exile [than the twenty-five years he has spent away from Romania beginning in 1977]. He is the Exile with capital E, he embodies the prototype or
the archetype of the exile. Even when he was in Romania, Paul Goma was an
exile (see Laszlo, http://ournet.md/~paulgoma). He continued to feel an
exile also as a writer, finding it difficult to be at home in the convoluted metafictional style of the sixties and seventies, preferring a more direct, conversational style, peppered with imprecations and profanities. And, as we shall see
below, he was a stranger also to the carefully monitored thematics of postStalinist fiction, preferring not to accept the pact with authorities that his generational colleagues had for the most part accepted; he broke taboos, not only
during the Stalinist period but also during the post-Stalinist period instituted
by Ceausescu. And he has continued to be an archetypal stranger also in exile,
refusing to join the well-established structures of the Romanian exile and to
be guided by group interests.
Already as a young man, Goma suffered political persecution at the hand of
the communist authorities. In 1952, while attending tenth grade, he was expelled from the Gheorghe Lazar High School in Sibiu for praising in class the
anti-communist partisans and keeping a coded personal journal. He managed
to complete his high school education in another southern Transylvanian
town and was admitted in 1953 to the Institute of Literature and Literary
Criticism in 1953, a mostly Stalinist institution modeled after a similar school
in Moscow. His defiant attitude in writing classes, and his support for the 1956
Hungarian uprising (he read publicly a fragment of a novel in which a Romanian student returns his Young Communist League card in solidarity with the
Hungarians) led to his arrest on November 22 and imprisonment at Jilava
(1957) and Gherla (1958). As a proof that the Romanian authorities were not
yet ready to accept deviations from the dogma of Socialist Realism, Goma was
assigned, immediately after being released from prison, forced domicile in Latesti (a village in the Baragan Plain abandoned by deported peasants) until
1963. In 1965, Goma reenrolled at the University of Bucharest, but was
forced to abandon his degree in philology in 1967, under pressure from the
Securitate.
The persecutions Goma suffered under Ceausescus neo-totalitarian regime in the 1970s are well-documented in his own work and in the testimonies
of others. In 1972, Goma and a few other writers protested the hardening of
party control over literary culture and the changes in the Statutes of the
Writers Union that made it harder for rebellious writers to be delegated to the
National Conference. Goma was punished at once by being prevented from
345
participating in the Writers Conference. The following few years, he was refused publication repeatedly, beaten in the street, and sent to the Rahova
prison after he voiced publicly his support for the signatories of the Czechoslovak Charta 77 movement. By the time he sent, via a Belgian diplomat, a
letter of support to Pavel Kohout ( January 1977), one of the initiators of
Charta 77, Goma had become a one-man opposition in communist Romania.
He wrote in this letter:
I declare my solidarity with your action; the Czechoslovak situation is with unessential
differences shared also by Romania. We leave and survive in the same Camp [] (its
capital: Moscow). [] The same absence of elementary rights, the same contempt for
man, the same shamelessness of lies everywhere. Everywhere there is also poverty,
economic chaos, demagoguery, uncertainty, terror. [] But it has been proven and it will
be proven again that one can oppose the programmatic degradation to which we are
submitted here, under Stalinist socialism. (Diac)
In February the same year, Goma addressed a message directly to President

Ceausescu, inviting him to co-sign a letter of support for the Czechoslovak
human rights movement. A third letter, which he addressed to a Belgrade conference convened to analyze the application of the principles of the Helsinki
accord, was co-signed initially by eight other Romanians. Two hundred more
people signed later, including the writer Ion Negoitescu, students, and
workers like Vasile Paraschiv who subsequently organized, with Gomas encouragement, the first free trade union. This letter decried the violations of the
civil rights written into the Romanian Constitution, such as the freedom of the
press, the freedom of association, as well as the right to free circulation of
people, ideas, and information. Many participants in the Goma movement
were subsequently given a passport and encouraged to leave the country.
This created the impression that solidarity with Goma could get you a passport to leave the country a matter upon which Goma ironically reflected in
several of his later works. For Goma himself, the movement brought further
persecution and physical abuse at the hands of the Securitate general Nicolae
Plesita. Finally, Goma was forced at the end of 1977 to take refuge in France
and file for political asylum, together with his wife Ana Maria, daughter of the
pre-1944 communist activist Petre Navodaru-Fischer, and his two-year old
son. This was the second time he was given a passport to leave the country; the
first time, in 1972, he was allowed to travel to his native Bessarabia, as well as to
France and Italy, in response to invitations to read and lecture. Against the
hope of the Romanian regime, Goma did return home and became the regimes main political irritation until 1977, when he was permanently expelled.
Lieutenant-General Ion Mihai Pacepa, former Director of the Romanian
Intelligence Service and special advisor to Ceausescu, who defected to the
346
West in 1978, documents in Red Horizons (1987) the persecution and intimidation to which Goma was submitted after he appealed to the signatories of
the Helsinki accord to monitor the political repression in Romania. Beaten
savagely in the street and in his cell by a hired professional boxer, Goma was
freed temporarily on Ceausescus order before the latters official visit to the
US in 1977. Once in the West, Goma was targeted for assassination. In 1978,
the Securitate tried to poison Gomas son, Filip, in 1982 Goma himself received a letter bomb, which was defused by the French police. The same year,
the Securitate sent officer Matei Pavel Hirsch (Haiducu) to Paris with the
mission to eliminate Goma and another Romanian dissident by any means,
but Haiducu turned himself in to the French counter-intelligence (see
Pacepa 6, 1545; Funderbank 66).
Gomas life as a refugee from Bessarabia after its Soviet invasion and as a
victim of repeated incarceration and persecution is not that different from the
life of other writers who survived the Communist gulags. Recent estimations
put the number of victims who were arrested, interrogated, tortured, and reeducated in Romanian prisons and camps between 1948 and 1960 to more
than a million (see Kanterian). The worst repression took place during the
purges at the end of the 1940s and beginning of the fifties, led by Alexandru
Draghici as interior minister and Alexandru Nicholski, as Securitate general.
After a brief liberalization in the mid sixties, Ceausescu reintroduced a neoStalinist form of repression against dissidents and working class activists. Like
the Moldavians Nicolae Costenco and Alexei Marinat, the Ukrainian Vasyl
Barka, or the Romanian Ion Caraion, Goma, continued to be persecuted and
could publish about his gulag experiences only abroad, beginning in 1971 (see
below). His case is different, however, because of the violence with which
Gomas work was repressed from the very beginning.
Clearly, Goma fits neither of the two categories that Mikls Haraszti established for dissident writers in The Velvet Prison: he is neither a Nave Hero,
who refuses self-censorship and compromises and exiles himself from the
world of aesthetics (151), nor a Maverick Artist who smuggles messages between the lines, disrupting state culture at its foundation with his alternative
art (152). He did not simply reject the notion of art as service in the name of
some ill-defined notion of spiritual independence, his imagination flooded
with romantic utopias (154). On the contrary, as we shall see below, Goma
mixed from the beginning a pragmatic focus on art in the service of truth and
collective emancipation with a notion of artistic integrity that, at least in the
earlier phase, included also stylistic experimentation. He not only tested the limits of permissibility (Haraszti 157), as some dissident writers were wont to
do, but circumvented them altogether by smuggling his work abroad. In this
347
sense, he refused to play the role of a regulating pressure valve in the system of
directed culture. For one thing, the cultural system introduced by Ceausescus
regime after 1971 was a return to Stalinist impositions and not the sophisticated directed culture that Haraszti saw in Kdrs Hungary. As Haraszti put
it, The more talented and flexible the state, the more pleasurably it can suck
the dissidents vital fluids into the organism of state culture (159). In Ceausescus Romania, a radical dissident like Goma was totally inassimilable, his
work and career refusing to lubricate and ameliorate the system by its counterexample. According to a Hungarian saying, quoted by Haraszti, if Solzhenitsyn had lived in Hungary, he would have been appointed president of the
Writers Union [] given time (156). In Romania, a Solzhenitsyn-figure like
Goma, who obsessively focused on the prison system built by the communists (Cesereanu 118), could only be harassed, imprisoned, and banished. Ion
Negoitescu, Ion Vianu, and the other few who signed Gomas protest in 1977
were likewise ostracized, deprived of respectability, especially the kind offered by the honorable world of communism as Vianu ironically remarked in an interview with Lidia Vianu (Censorship in Romania 7374).
After Goma received permission to publish again in 1966, his signature appeared first in the magazine Luceafarul, the new outlet for promising young
writers. The magazine gave him an award for fiction in 1966, a surprising decision given Gomas history as a former political prisoner. Encouraged by the official Romanian condemnation of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia
on August 21, 1968, Goma joined the Communist party the same day, together
with a group of other young writers. His first and only book of short fiction to
appear in Romania, Camera de alaturi (The Adjoining Room; 1968) was published the same year. However, his testimonial novel Ostinato, which challenged
the periods taboos by focusing on the experiences of the Romanian gulag, was
refused by the State Publishing House for Literature and Art (ESPLA). Two
sections of it had, nevertheless, been published in the premier literary publication, Gazeta literara, in March and April, and further sections were printed in
Gomas Camera de alaturi. Unwilling to make any further revisions to his manuscript, toning down his treatment of the repressive regime in Romania, Goma
published in 1971 his novel abroad, in German under its original title, and in
French with the new title, La cellule des librables (The Cell of Those Who Can Be
Freed). It was also translated into Dutch in 1974. The publication of this novel
caused quite a scandal: the Romanian officials left the Frankfurt Book Fair
when the publisher Suhrkamp refused to withdraw the book. Goma was excluded from the Romanian Communist Party for putting in the hands of the
enemy a weapon the latter could use against our mother country. With typical
party-inspired inconsistency, he was accused simultaneously of writing an un-
348
patriotic book, an anti-Soviet book, an aesthetically inferior work, as well as a

novel that distorts socialist realities (see Gabanyi 203).
Gomas next novel, Usa (The Door), which contained portraits of recognizable communist figures, including the countrys president and his wife, was
again rejected by Romanias main literary publisher, Cartea Romneasca, in
1970, but was published abroad, first in Germany under the title Die Tr
(1972) and in France Elles taient quatre (They Were Four; 1974). Gallimard
in Paris published also Gomas documentary Gherla (1976), Dans le cercle
(Within the Circle; 1977), and Garde inverse (Reverse Guard; 1979).
After he was forced into exile, Goma published in 1981 Les Chiens de mort
(The Dogs of Death), focused on the Pitesti political prison, where the
prisoners were coerced to practice inter-torture, as Goma calls it, tormenting each other as part of a ruthless program of re-education carried out between 1948 and 1953. Gomas novel foregrounds the complex process of
brainwashing and brain-changing that had as main objective the annihilation
of the subjects personality and the construction of a new self-deprecating
identity in a terrible ritual of death and resurrection through public confession (Cesereanu 365). Le tremblement des hommes/Culoarea curcubeului77 (on the
1977 movement for human rights) and Chass-crois (Soldatul cinelui; 1983) also
exposed in brutally honest detail reminiscent of Solzhenitsyn the treatment of
political prisoners in the Romanian system, and the fragile and continually
threatened life of a political exile like the Bulgarian Georgi Markov or Goma
himself. Bonifacia (1987) is a docufiction, a documentary novel that represents
closely enough the authors return to college after incarceration, witnessing
the contradictory life of the Bucharest literary elite, traversed by fake dissident
political figures and dubious supporters in the party nomenclature. Le calidor
(1989) returns us to an exploration of mid-century historical traumas as experienced by a young child that is confronted with the collapse of his innocent
world of imagination. All these works were written originally in Romanian
but, with rare exceptions, they were first published in French, German,
Dutch, and Swedish translations.
Gomas first book of short fiction, Camera de alaturi (The Adjoining Room;
1968) is focused primarily on the writers childhood and his youthful discoveries and disorientations. O ce veste minunata (Wonderful Tidings),
concerned with the experiences of a recently freed prisoner who carries messages from inmates to their relatives in the disorienting world of freedom,
anticipates some of the political themes of Gomas later work. The protagonist, Gulimanescu, returns in the novel Ostinato under the name Guliman, as
the Gypsy sage who moves from prison to prison, bringing solace to the other
prisoners in the form imaginative storytelling.
349
A comparison with Augustin Buzuras political fiction may explain why

none of Gomas subsequent work was allowed to appear in Romania. Goma
shares with Buzura a single-minded concentration on the detail of life, but
while Buzuras novels were published in Romania after concessions made to
the censorship, Gomas novel-essays refused any such compromises. (Of
course, the opposition between internally censored vs. published abroad
should not automatically grant superior quality to the latter: aesthetic, structural, and other criteria will have to be taken into account, as Buzura was all
too happy to point out in the recent interview Acolo, la Louisville, which
tried to deny the literary value of Gomas work). Denise Deletant has similarly compared Alexandru Ivasiucs Pasarile (Birds; 1970) and Paul Gomas Ostinato, both remarkable for the accurate reconstruction of that periods atmosphere:
Both writers had been arrested in 1956they were students at that timefor having participated in the actions inspired by the Hungarian anti-Communist revolt; they became
friends in prison. Their heroes share the same fate: a political detention through the
1950s, then the struggle for reintegration after their release. In exposing the process of
collectivization [the enforced association of farmers in collective farms note MCP],
the treatment of convicts in prisons and that of political suspects by the Securitate,
Goma was more courageous in that he transgressed the limits allowed by the Censors office
(Deletant 1801; for a comparison of Goma with Ivasiuc, see Gabanyi 7374, 184)
Most commentators have divided Gomas work into fiction (the novels Ostinato and Les Chiens de mort, ou, La passion selon Pitesti) and testimonial literature,
what Cesereanu (293) calls his trilogy of aggression and which includes
Gherla, Le tremblement des homes/Culoarea curcubeului 77 and Soldatul cinelui.
However, Goma continually transgresses and complicates the boundaries between fiction and testimony. Most of his work focuses, if only indirectly, on
the world of concentration camps, foregrounding the basic themes of freedom and entrapment, fall and redemption. In a reversal of Dantes metaphysical mapping of the universe, Gomas work describes a multilayered and inescapable hell which allows at best only a provisional exit, with no real
opportunity for redemption.
Ostinato launched the theme of the Romanian Gulag, blending reportage
and fiction, improvisational and explorative narrative. The novel starts in the
liberation room, where the narrator Ilarie Langa and other soon-to-befreed prisoners await their liberation in 1967, in the aftermath of a party decree that frees most common law and political prisoners. Many of the detainees in this Dantesque cosmology of the cell (Siegfried Lenz in the afterword of Ostinato 457) are political, including some who had participated in the
1956 student unrest or were victims of persecution. By contrast, the tractor
350
driver Marinica was sent to prison for killing a woman when drunk; Lemnaru
was condemned to twenty-five years for a crime of passion, while the narrator
was condemned to seven years, later extended to eleven, for having helped his
cancer-suffering mother end her life with an overdose of morphine. One of
the guardians is more willing to understand Langas mercy crime by contrast
to the state crimes committed by the sympathizers of the Hungarian anticommunist revolution, but the novel levels out these differences, suggesting
that all detainees are dehumanized and entrapped by the penal system. Once
inside, there is no real escape: Langa himself becomes embroiled in a politically staged trial, in which he is accused of participating in a secret counterrevolutionary organization supported by the Vatican. The liberation chamber
is a purgatory where people are cured of waiting by waiting (84); it is a
memory chamber, where every character is caught in an uncertain world of
memories and present anxieties.
The character who attracts most attention is the Gypsy Guliman, who pendulates between prison and non-prison (117), connecting the world outside
with the world inside. He struts into the novel like Ken Keseys Randle Patrick
McMurphy to take over the imagination of the other prisoners with his picturesque stories. Most of his stories have a hopeful ending, or at least remain
suspended in the realm of promise: the promise of freedom, or of reunion
with the woman left behind. But he can also tell disturbing stories about his
experience at the Gherla prison, ruled over by the sinister Doctor Sin (Menghele) who cures patients by hitting them in the area of pain. His own story
belies his apparent optimism: imprisoned in the 1950s because of the political
jokes and ironic slogans he spreads in the market place, he moves inside the
different circles of the Romanian gulag, from Gherla to the work camps at the
Danube-Black Sea Canal. He is illiterate yet deeply philosophic; he discourses
on Froaid and psicanalitica (pussyanalytics), applying cat behavior to
people. He mocks the notion that all villains under communism are non-Romanian, giving examples of native torturers like Petre Goiciu who practice
extreme forms of the reeducation/liquidation of political prisoners.
Stimulated by Gulimans stories, Langa tries to rehearse in his memory his
life before and during incarceration. His life appears to him as a sequence of
renunciations and false escapes. His escape from prison through a pipeline
can only fail because it is prompted by the illusion that there is a real difference between the outside and inside of the communist prison system. His
mercy killing of his mother was also prompted by a false sense of liberation
from an oppressive destiny and from his own incapacity to deal with her suffering. Half way through the novel Langa becomes cynical about the possibility of any true liberation, denying (to the chagrin of the other prisoners) that
351
the decree which is supposed to free them has any reality. As Monica Lovinescu comments, Langa sees the promised liberation from prison as only a
new and last stage of closure (522). As he himself puts, with a dizzying sense
of irony, liberation proceeds from the outside of the inside towards the true
outside, not from the cell, so I have to pass through the purgatory of the
yard that will be another liberation; the other, the real one, will proceed
from here, directly (Ostinato 43). In a totalitarian state, the opposition freedom-incarceration is illusory, one being liberated from a communist prison
into a political system that operated itself like a prison.
In an imaginary encounter with a divine avatar (or Dostoevskian Grand Inquisitor), the narrator is further warned that his freedom may feel more
prison than prison (45), contaminating him with the worm of disbelief.
However, instead of accepting the divine (or malefic) advice to relinquish
burdensome freedom, the narrator challenges Gods position in relation to
the horrors of the communist Gulag. Through his passivity, God is just as
guilty of collaborationism with the regime as its human victims. The latter are
caught in a vicious circle, with the guardians and the guarded [] guarding
each other, being as (un)free as the others (173). Yet in Langas (and in
Gomas) eyes, this vicious circle can be broken through a passionate refusal of
cowardly compromises. The protagonist even calls for a new Nrnberg trial
of communist terror, not simply in order to punish the perpetrators of crimes
against humanity but to make sure that things are not forgotten, that evil is
not eternal, but a simple accident (39293, 403).
The narrators chance to return to a more normal existence after liberation
from prison depends on his capacity to preserve his basic humanity and connect to other human beings, especially to women like Catinca, a telephone assistant he met before his arrest. In the narrators imagination, enhanced by the
stories told by Guliman, Catinca becomes a mythical figure of loyalty and support, a Penelope (see Cesereanu 303) who encourages all detainees awaiting
their liberation. The narrator also resorts to dialogic writing as a mode that
can make sense of his messy existence. The novel as whole emphasizes dialogue and alternative storytelling in a montage of voices that retain their accents, their quirkiness, and theatricality. Dialogue with minimal contextual or
situational references often mixes with Langas fragmented interior monologue, first person collaborates with the third and the second, and past mixes
with the present and a hypothetical future. Where the grand narrative (the
plot of history) fails, smaller personal narratives, filtered through emotion
rather than argument, seem to prevail.
Against Gulimans advice to the narrator to leave the past alone, Langa
revisits it in half-fantastic dreamscapes, mixed with documentary prose, going
352
back to his childhood in a Brasov German school and the political persecution suffered by his family. The narrators recuperative effort is emphasized
also by the musical metaphor of the title which suggests the obstinate repetition of a motif or phrase until it builds a rhythmic theme, a pattern of repetition with variation and development. The last two parts of the novel correlate
this metaphoric motif with a renewed focus on women figures, dream, and
self-reflection, weaving various themes together. The first of these two parts
(a narrative interlude) focuses on the story of the narrators mother, including
her merciful death, but also on her metamorphosis into other women figures.
In the third part, the narrator reconnects various characters and stories in a
loosely interwoven structure that reflects the ostinato musical composition
the narrator is working on. Retrieving a number of characters that become
emblematic for certain attitudes in the novel, the narrator has difficulty sorting out his feelings towards Catinca, for her undeserved devotion to him; towards Marian Cusa, the liberated writer who betrays truth in order to court
publishers, and towards himself as a liberated prisoner who at the end of
the novel steps across the ambivalent space that divides the inner from the
outer carcer space. Langa can only ask in the end, Where is my liberation?
Further back, deeper still (Ostinato 451).
Usa (The Door) also has a complex narrative structure, experimenting with
ways of translating narratively contradictory states of consciousness and
memory. One of the characters here, a female commissar responsible for terrorizing even her uncle during the collectivization of agriculture, regrets some
of her acts of terror on a human level, but not on an ideological one.
After his forced exile to France, Goma published Les Chiens de mort, ou, La
passion selon Pitesti (The Dogs of Death, or The Passions in the Pitesti Version;
1981); the first Romanian edition, Patimile dupa Pitesti, was published in 1990,
but was withdrawn from the market two days later and the printing plates destroyed, to be republished only in 1999. The novel focuses on the historical
figure of Eugen Turcanu, the chief torturer in the reeducation prison at Pitesti, who is given an infernal appearance upon his entry: he has a rhinoceros
horn instead of chin (Patimile 11), eyes that shift colors from yellow to violet
to grey, and dreams that are haunted by angels with crocodile jaws and wolf
hair (110). Yet Turcanu is very much a product of his culture, an emanation
of the reign of terror in the 1950s Romania, intent on purifying social rot
through extreme methods that include torture and making everybody feel
guilty. The Great Re-educator, as Turcanu is called in the novel, is directly
related to the Grand Inquisitor in Brothers Karamazov and Piotr Stepanovich
Verkhovensky in The Possessed. He sees himself as the evangelist of a new
order, promoter of a dark scripture. In a key scene, Turcanu practices a parody
353
of baptism in the prisons closet, complete with the crowning of the Christ figure with feces and a sexual orgy involving Biblical figures (17073). Himself a successful example of a reeducated prisoner, Turcanu applies sophisticated forms of torture to his victims, treating them as remoldable clay
(Patimile 104), taking them apart and reassembling them into unrecognizable
new men (98, 136). According to Cesereanu (296), Turcanus shares with
Dostoevskys Verkhovensky a sadistic urge to destroy an individuals humanity as a tool of purification and to enhance collective terror through reciprocal denunciation.
Vasile Pop plays an important role in Turcanus demonstration. As the recorder of the Great Re-educators works, he is treated differently from the
other victims, at least at the beginning, as his eyes and ears are educated to absorb the enormity of Turcanus assault on human dignity. In a later stage of
reeducation, he is forced to practice intertorture with his twin brother,
Elislav, who becomes a punishing/redemptive Angel in Vasiles imagination.
After Vasiles failed attempt to kill the Great Re-educator, he is submitted to
further torment that includes the real or imaginary killing of his brother (the
novel maintains some ambiguity about this). Thirty years after these events,
Vasile tries to exorcise the ghost of the Great Re-educator by writing a Gospel of the victims of the communist regime. His text overlaps partly with
Gomas own novel which tries to wrest some understanding out of the dark
history of Stalinism.
Gomas subsequent works became more impatient with narration, replacing fiction with testimony, and narrative construction with confession. Characteristic for this later approach are Gherla, Dans le cercle, Garde inverse, Le tremblement des hommes, Les Chiens de mort, and Chass-crois. All these works map
closed spaces (prison cell, forced domicile), foregrounding the psychological
tension between a prison space and a contestatory imagination. Gherla gives
up narrative embellishments, resorting to direct testimony in a sarcasticangry style that Nicolae Balta (Rezumatul) contrasts with the more detached or humanistic perspective of other detention memoirs. Gomas irony
is most ferocious when he describes the home-grown contributions to the
history of incarceration and torture. As Cesereanu argues, Goma is one of the
few memorialists interested in describing in detail the process of torturing
from the point of view of both the victim and the interrogator, whose inventiveness in inflicting pain is boundless (182).
The epigraph of Gherla (Most of my books are posthumous) describes
accurately the difficulties of such documentary political works. Begun during
Gomas first trip abroad (1972), this book went through several different versions, shifting from a dialogue with a skeptical Western interlocutor (niece of
354
a former political prisoner in the Romanian gulag, now living in France) to an

authorial voice in passionate dialogue with itself. Even in the earlier version,
we can infer the interlocutors reactions only from the narrators responses.
The narrative voice is often ironic, argumentative, emphasizing the diabolic
nature of prison rules: the prison doctor is punished for administering cough
syrup to the prisoners in bottles with stickers that can be reused for their own
writing; prisoners denounce one another out of perpetual fear; in prison, nobody is allowed to use the plural we, speaking for others rather than just for
oneself. The narrator defends the memorialistic nature of his work, its sacrifice of style for truth. He admits that in retelling a certain event in different
versions over time he ends up rewriting it, but he still rebukes his former
prison mates for refusing to write about their prison experience for fear of
distorting it. Breaking the silence is more important than producing a well
polished work (221).
One of the central events the narrator retells after many preparations and
detours is the atrocious beating he received two days before liberation, on
November 19, 1958. The day starts with a fight between one of the prisons informants, church painter Barbu, and a Swabian prisoner from the Banat area,
Klapka, arrested for attempting illegal border crossing. The narrator takes
Klapkas side and is in turn accused by Barbu of sending secret messages to
his fascist friends through the heating unit. Things escalate further when
Goiciu, the supreme inquisitor famous for perfecting torturing procedures
out of Dostoevsky, shows up to confront Klapka and the narrator. The two
are tortured by the prisons associate director, Istrate (an elementary school
teacher and thus an intellectual), under the complicitous eyes of the prisons
doctor and with the rueful participation of Goiciu, who fakes the attitude
of a disappointed parent, unwillingly chastising his children.
Upon further instigation by the prison informers, Klapka and the narrator
are submitted to a second, even more brutal beating in the old section of the
prison, built in the time of Empress Maria Theresa. This phase, which begins
with Istrates attempt to establish a complicitous relationship with the narrator, mocking the lack of intelligence and polish of the other torturers, gives
way to a brutal assault on the narrator from all directions, with Istrate as
master of ceremony and the other guardians as his dutiful tools. As the narrator reaches the end of his capacity to endure, he promises never to forget,
never to keep silent about this torture (170). The documentary we read is his
Solzhenitsyn-like Day from My Life at Gherla.
These phases in the punishment of the narrator are retold with many interruptions and detours that set up the larger context for the events: the hardening of prison conditions after the Hungarian revolution, the importation
355
of the Soviet model of repressive political police (the Securitate), the brutal
suppression of the rebellion of the frontier-crossers at Gherla, the increased
terror instituted through torturers like Todea (nicknamed Stalin), Pop, Vasea,
Sigi Beiner and Gruia (Grnberg) who represent a veritable ethnic cross-section in the Stalinist prison world. There are also a number of detours through
earlier periods in the narrators life, from the time he worked as a pioneer instructor, to his trial by a tribunal stacked with Securitate agents. Women (such
as the girl from the neighborhood whose growing to adulthood the prisoners
follow from the window of their security cell) also play a role in connecting
the prisoners to a fragile outside world.
Gherla thus develops through arborescent narration, each story forking out
into other stories in a nonlinear, expanding structure. Many of the stories are
told from partial perspectives, in unverifiable versions as witnessed (seen or
only overheard). Whether a direct participant or only an observer, the narrator is emotionally involved in the tale. He is often passionate, accusing the
Russians for bringing only calamities to the area or denouncing ironically the
naivet of the prisoners who expect the American Sixth Fleet to come to
Gherla by way of the Mediterranean, Black Sea, and various internal Romanian rivers, to save them. He also advances historical opinions that are not always thought through properly: he compares the fascist occupation with the
Soviet one, declaring the length of occupation to be more important than its
intensity, and he describes fascism and communism as versions of the same
totalitarian ideology. The narrator also points to the preponderance of nonRomanian guardians in the first phase of the Romanian gulag (Hungarian
Jews educated in Transylvania, Russian-speaking Jews from Bessarabia and
Bucovina), but admits that in a later phase guardians and torturers were recruited from among the Romanian country folk. Doctor Sin himself, also
known as the Gherla Mengele, is either a Saxon or a Romanian from Transylvania. The narrator claims not to be afraid to speak the truth, which includes
a focus on both the role of minorities in the repressive communist regime and
the cowardice and collaborationism of Romanians.
The online version of Gherla continues with an unfinished epistolary-documentary fragment titled Latesti (1973), which covers the period from the narrators liberation from Gherla to his surprise trip to Latesti, where he is given
forced domicile. The fragment starts in the epistolary mode, addressing the
narrators former lover now defected to France, but it gradually shifts to a
straightforward diary. The story covers the narrators exit from prison on November 21, 1958, his marching painfully down the street on his mutilated feet
(most of his nails plucked out during torture). He is taken to the local gendarmes who treat him more humanely than the Securitate officers, and send
356
him to town to get cigarettes and food. When he buys books and newspapers
with the money received from home, he learns about some of the political
changes in the world missed while he was in prison. On the way to the Baragan area, he meets his mother who is drugged, dreamy, unaware of what she is
saying. At the destination he meets his father who tells him of his many futile
efforts to see him in prison, which finally made him sick with tuberculosis.
The fragment ends with the father bribing a functionary to get his son a good
house in Latesti; in a conversation with his son he compares the Soviet treatment of political prisoners with the Romanian one: the casual attitude of the
latter appears to him crueler.
With the same unsparing and honest approach, Goma focuses in Le tremblement des homes/Culoarea curcubeului 77) on collaborationists and informants,
assigning their betrayal an existential and moral dimension: they purchase
their survival at the cost of victimizing others. Even those who do not protest
or take the side of the victim turn into instruments of torture (15051). As
Goma points out, the final result of reeducation in the Romanian communist gulag is the abolition of the right to be a victim (352), to remember ones
ordeal. Therefore, writing remains for Goma the most important tool or remembering. In all of Gomas detention memoirs, there is an urgency of confession that comes from a promise to not forget at the height of his suffering.
There is also a certain gradation in Gomas memorialistic work, from the violent repression in the 1958 Gherla, to the 1977 interrogation in the Rahova
prison (Le tremblement des homes/Culoarea curcubeului 77), and his Parisian exile
in Chass-crois/Soldatul cinelui, still endangered by the long arm of the Romanian Securitate with bomb threats and plots to poison him.
Much of Gomas work in the 1980s and early 1990s can be defined as docufiction, for it draws on the writers biography, raising it to the level of an
epic-allegorical battle with the forces of totalitarianism. Justa, the novel
written in exile (1985) but published in its Romanian original only in 1995, focuses on an ironic counterpoint to the communist history of Romania and the
personal history of the writer: the impact of the Hungarian 1956 rebellion on
the Romanian student circles and the role that the official factory of writers
(the Bucharest School of Literature) played in laying the foundations of Romanian Socialist Realism. The novel alludes to many historical figures (political activists and collaborationist writers) but conceals the names of the students participating in the 1956 events. Many events in the narrators
biography (childhood in Bessarabia, escape with his parents to Transylvania
as the Soviet troupes march in, attending school in Sibiu, short involvement
with the School of Literature, arrest and deportation to the Baragan Plain, and
discovery of liberating literature) represent a fictional version of the authors
357
life. The title character, Justa, is a seductive and contradictory figure who attends meetings in which class-alien reactionary elements are being purged.
Her alternative name, Sandra, may also allude to a historical figure, the novelist Alexandra Indries (Pitu 129).
In Bonifacia (written in 1983, published 1987), historical figures like Al. Ivasiuc (Alec) and other members of the literary elite mix with fictional characters. This docu-novel, placed in 1965 during a period of quasi-liberalization,
advances quickly through dialogue and narrative vignettes. The authorial narrator is thirty years old, at times self-ironic but more often distrustful of other
people around him, including some of his former comrades in prison. Moving
back into their prison years at the end of the fifties, the narrator tries to decide
whether Alec was an informant or rather a courageous man. He interrogates
his friend, asking him to explain the difference in treatment that the two had
received from authorities: the narrator was refused any kind of rehabilitation,
whereas Alec was encouraged to publish by the cultural commissars. In their
dialogues, Alec remains totally self-absorbed, ready to exploit the narrrators
acquaintance with Bonifacia, daughter of a party bureaucrat who controls the
quota of paper for Alecs novels.
The authorial narrator is himself interested in Bonifacia Frnculescu,
thinking she could help him obtain political rehabilitation through her uncle,
an important figure in the party nomenclature. On their first encounter in a
college class, the narrator is fascinated and repulsed by Bonifacias rotundity,
continuous mastication, and aggressive attention to him. She helps him feel
less awkward among his young classmates upon his return to college after
more than a decade of interruption (during his arrest). The narrator is bemused by Bonifacias extravagant vulgarity but prefers her to the sophisticated Old Slavonic teacher, who keeps reminding him that he is a tolerated
student, still on trial. In describing Bonifacias appearance and behavior, the
narrator mixes naturalistic observation with comic hyperbole, and sarcasm
with praise. Her intimate smells both entice and repel the narrator (they are
also connected to other smells experienced in prison, including the smell of
fear). In spite of all her failures, physical and social, Bonifacia seems to have a
certain generosity (she is preoccupied with obtaining better living conditions
for the narrator to write his forbidden novels), but the narrators skepticism
towards women, especially women in privileged positions, prevents him from
taking her seriously.
In spite of his bias, the narrator acknowledges the redeeming role that
women played in his life; he connects his story of Bonifacia to that of other
women he shared his bed with in the Latesti camp. One such story retells how
a young Bessarabian girl, accused of having fled the Soviet paradise, is con-
358
demned to serve as a sexual slave of the Securitate people. Two other women
hold a certain emotional and intellectual power over the narrator: Ela (a political victim of the regime) is a true muse, who encourages him to write his literature without thoughts of publication; the other, Lila Piper Alecs wife and
poetry editor for Romanias premier literary magazine functions more like
an ironic muse, giving the narrator cynical advice on the use of connections to
get published.
As in Gomas earlier books, the narrator takes on the role of the historian,
weaving together familial, personal, and collective narratives. The visit of his
father helps him focus on the latters biography as concentration camp
prisoner and political refugee, but also as a compromiser, forced to teach his
students a communist philosophy and history he does not believe in (182).
Retelling his fathers stories and other more recent episodes, the narrator extends his life, putting some order into it. He also learns to deal with his own
fears, both present and past, by connecting them into a narrative of repeated
confrontations with the communist authorities:
No, I never knew a first one, perhaps that is why all beatings were simultaneously firstand-next: I received them, dizzied by their novelty, paralyzed by surprise, and at the same
time prepared, initiated, experienced. This is how I grew up, this is how I lived, this is
how I was (am) (151)
The novel manuscript that the narrator has written is itself an exercise in unforgetting, focused not only on the Stalinist past but also on the post-Stalinist compromises of the mid-1960s. The latter part of Bonifacia offers a comicironic chronicle of the literary world as experienced at the Writers Restaurant
in Bucharest, or through Lilas copious parody of Romanian contemporary
literature as a conspiracy of co-opted writers, most of them from Transylvania. The narrator navigates awkwardly around this world in search of somebody to bail him out (he has no money to pay for his dinner) but also in search
of companionship. He is finally saved by Virgil Mazilescu, who includes him
among the oneirists (Titel, Turcea, Tepeneag, Dimov, etc.), a new trend of
political surrealism soon to be dismantled by the Party authorities. The narrators presence at the oneiric table seems fortunate, for he is given the good
news that the magazine Luceafarul will publish his short fiction.
The narrators reaction to this acceptance is one of disbelief and suspicion.
He cannot understand why a magazine edited by three collaborationist writers
wants to publish him, even if the type of shorter fiction he writes seems to
have suddenly more appeal than the grandiloquent epic tradition of the Stalinist decade represented by writers like Petru Dumitriu, who in the meantime
had defected to the West. Predictably, the narrator feels guilty for publishing a
359
story in one of the official literary magazines, especially after the newsvendor
reminds him that no published literature is worth reading. At the end of the
novel, he throws away the magazine copy with his published story; emancipated of any connections (both his novel manuscript and Bonifacia have mysteriously disappeared), he feels free to return to his writing. This paradoxical
ending suspends the dilemma he had been pondering earlier when, as he condemned the compromises perpetrated by Alec and other former detainees, he
realized that he was exposing himself to similar criticism by continuing his relationship with the niece of communist criminals and by hoping one day to officially publish his honest literature.
With Le calidor (1989), subtitled in Romanian a Bessarabian Childhood,
Goma returns to an exploration of his childhood and adolescence. In spite of
its broad autobiographical stretch, covering the troubled period of the 1940s,
this novel manages to develop a firmer narrative grip on history than some of
Gomas previous works, which tended towards amorphous documentary narration. The difference here is the consistency of the narrative point of view:
from the privileged position offered by the calidor (house porch), the child
is initiated into the life and history of Soviet-occupied Bessarabia, which corresponds to the destruction of the childs edenic vision of the world. The historical material here presented is nevertheless comprehensive, starting with
the history of the narrators parents, village teachers who experience the traumatic events of mid century, with the father arrested by the Soviets and sent to
Siberia, his Romanian books burnt in the school yard. The family considers
him dead and digs a grave for him, only to receive a postcard from Romania
that informs them that Eufimie is now a Romanian prisoner-of-war in dire
need of documents to certify that he is actually a Romanian ethnic. After he is
finally freed, the whole family takes refuge in Transylvania, where they suffer
through the vicissitudes of the war and the fear of being returned to the Soviet
Union. Ironically, they are captured by their Romanian brethren while hiding
in the woods, and delivered to the local authorities who are keen on sending
back to the Soviet Union all Romanians from Bessarabia and Bucovina. The
family escapes repatriation and a sure death in the camps of Siberia by presenting fake identity documents to the Romanian authorities.
Arta refugii: o copilarie transilvana (The Art of Refuge/Taking Flight Again: A
Transylvanian Childhood; 1991) continues the exploration begun in Din calidor, adopting the semi-autobiographical perspective of the slightly older boy,
who witnesses a new act in the drama of his family, now committed to
Transylvanian prisons. The boys education in the terrors of history adds a
new ironic twist, because those who are the agents of persecution are not the
Soviets but the Romanian brethren.
360
After 1989, Goma abandoned fiction altogether, focusing on the hyperincendiary personal diary (Pitu 131). This diary, which presents many contemporary Romanian writers and former associates in most unflattering
terms, exactly when they were getting ready to turn their self-proclaimed dissidence into post-communist cultural capital, ruined the honeymoon that
Gomas work seemed to enjoy immediately after the Fall of Ceausescu regime
(see Nimigean), when several of his works beginning with Gherla were republished. The Romanian edition of Culoarea curcubeului 77, printed by Humanitas in 1990, was withdrawn from the market two days later and the printing
plates destroyed. The same fate attended the Romanian edition of Garda
inversa, scheduled to be published by the poet and editor Marin Sorescu at the
Scrisul Romnesc Publishing House; he felt that this uncomfortable publication could hurt his political career in Iliescus post-communist government.
Gomas former supporters disassociated themselves from him after the
publication of the first three volumes of his Journal. He became a persona non
grata in many literary circles, including those around the countrys foremost
magazine, Romnia literara: in 1998, Nicolae Manolescu wrote an essay, Adio
domnule Goma (Farewell, Mr. Goma) that basically denied him the possibility to publish again in Manolescus representative journal of Romanian
writers. Other exiles had somewhat similar fates after the collapse of the communist regimes, for they were discouraged from returning home or ignored
after an initial flurry of articles about them that gave the impression that the
post-communist societies were ready to integrate them in new canons. With
these canons fiercely disputed by groups of indigenous writers, each with
more or less founded claims to an anti-communist pedigree, there was little
room left for uncomfortable figures like Goma, who was not interested in
joining any group and called to question the political careers of others. His intransigent attitude cost him his position in the Romanian letters. To this very
day he still has not been reinstated as a member of the Romanian Writers
Union from which he was excluded in 1977, while imprisoned at Rahova; nor
has he regained Romanian citizenship, continuing to reside in Paris as a stateless political refugee. In the 1990s, Goma turned down an offer of citizenship
from France, extended simultaneously to him and to Milan Kundera; more recently, a 2006 petition in favor of restoring his Romanian citizenship (signed,
among others, by the exiled scholars and writers Sorin Alexandrescu, Mircea
Iorgulescu, Norman Manea, Bujor Nedelcovici, Dusan Petrovici, and Dieter
Schlesak) was unsuccessful.
In spite of his political capital as an opponent of the communist regime, or
perhaps because of it, Goma has always been isolated, both before and after
1989, marginalized by the various political games played by his colleagues.
361
Some (like Augustin Buzura, but also the critics Nicolae Manolescu and
Eugen Simion) have denied his literary talent, arguing that his literature is too
steeped in autobiography, and possesses raw documentary value at best.
Nevertheless, Goma received in 1992 the Fiction Award from the Writers
Unions of both Romania and Moldova, and in 2007 he was named Honorable
Citizen of the City of Timisoara, where the anti-Ceausescu revolution started
in 1989.
Ethnicity has played an important role in Gomas recent work, and in some
critics reactions to it. As Goma reports in Le tremblement des homes, shortly before he was expelled from Romania he was stopped in the street by a patriot
who accused him of not being Romanian (he did have a non-Romanian grandparent, a Russian patronymic, and married a Jewish woman) or acting as a nonRomanian (35). Many of Gomas novels and memorialistic works have emphasized that the communist repression was not just a foreign phenomenon but
to an equal degree a Romanian one, a form of political and social self-mutilation (see Cesereanu 116). It is true, however, that several of his more recent
works that deal with the history of his native Bessarabia in the 1940s seem
to put the blame for the collapse of Bessarabia on the pro-Soviet Jews. A
number of commentators have found offensive Gomas references to Jews
and a Jewish conspiracy in Din calidor or in the fragments of his Journal published in the magazine Viata Romneasca (nr. 6, July 2005). As a result of this
publication, the associate editor of the journal, Liviu Ioan Stoiciu, was fired
preventively (see Diaconu), before any discussion of Gomas writing could
take place. Other literary magazines, both from Bucharest and from the provinces, considered the case a little more calmly, reflecting arguments on both
sides of the issue. The exiled writer and critic Dan Culcer openly protested
against what he saw as a return to censorship in post-communist Romania.
Further controversy was generated by Gomas Saptamna rosie 28 iunie 3
iulie sau Basarabia si Evreii (German edition, Die Rote Messe; 1984), which focused on the alleged acts of terrorism (assassinations, robbery, destruction of
businesses and churches) committed by Jews, Ukrainians, and other ethnic
groups against the withdrawing Romanian army and the Romanian population that stayed behind after the Soviet June 1940 occupation of Bessarabia
and Bucovina. Based partly on the documentation offered in Dutus and Botorans volume Situatia evreilor din Romnia, 19311941, itself originally rejected
by the Romanian press because of its controversial topic, Goma asks for a reexamination of the anti-Romanian violence committed by a Fifth Column
composed of Russians, Ukrainians and Jews between June 28 and July 3, 1940,
when over 300,000 Romanians were exterminated or deported to Siberia. According to Goma, these tragic events caused the harsh reprisals of the Ro-
362
manian army a year later. Starting with the June 29, 1941 pogrom in Iasi, the
Romanian army targeted not only Jews, but also Russians, Ukrainians, Armenians, Gypsies, and Bulgarians, who were beaten, lynched, and burnt to death.
Goma does not excuse the bestial and criminal behavior of Romanian
troupes, pointing out that they targeted, especially in Transnistria, innocent
people; still, he suggests that one needs to take into account also the red
genocide in Bucovina and Bessarabia, which preceded the Nazi Holocaust.
In a preface to the most recent edition of this work, posted on his website,
Goma claims that all he wanted to do in this documentary was to present in
parallel the dreadful deeds of the Romanians against the Jews and of the Jews
against the Romanians, emphasizing the importance of focusing also on the
communist genocide. However, while acknowledging the responsibility of the
Romanian government and army for their criminal and condemnable actions, which included the abominable pogrom in Iasi and deportations of
Jews to Transnistria, Goma still sees the former as reprisals for the events of
1940. The connection is at best tenuous: as Goma himself admits in note five,
the pogrom in Iasi and the simultaneous deportations of thousands of Jews to
Transnistria were meant not only to revenge the Jewish attacks against Romanians in Bessarabia and Bucovina, but also to solve the Jewish question.
Much of Gomas argument is impassioned, the argument of a pamphleteer
rather than that of a historian, which condemns the Bolshevik (foreign,
Jewish, Russian-Hungarian) colonizing invasion that brought Romania under
control after 1946. He also criticizes the reticence of historians and memorialists to discuss other genocides of the Armenians, of colonialism, of the
communist Gulag or to admit that a Red Holocaust was also carried out in
the name of Bolshevik ideology against the populations in the region, including Jews. In the addenda to the essay, Goma accuses foreign historians of
undermining the Romanian historical heritage, by imputing anti-Semitism
and proto-fascist ideas to early figures like the historian Mihai Kogalniceanu.
He tries to demonstrate, with quotes from Kogalniceanus 1869 discourses,
that this historian and political leader emphasized the need for economic, religious, and political freedoms for the Jewish population moving to the Romanian territories from the East. Yet, as Minister of Domestic Affairs, Kogalniceanu also expressed anxieties over the growing economic and cultural
power of the Jewish population, or the fact that as consumers rather than
producers they put a strain on Moldova. Furthermore, in some of the documents that Goma reproduces, it becomes evident that the Jews did not have
significant political rights, that their emancipation and recognition was still
an open problem at the end of the nineteenth century. They begin to receive
more rights and power in the northern territories (Galicia, Bukovina, and Bes-
363
sarabia), especially after the Bolshevik revolution, but their expectation that
Stalin would allow the establishment of a Jewish Republic in those territories
never came to pass.
In an article published in the French newspaper Le Monde, Mihai Dinu
Gheorghiu accused Goma of feeding the anti-Semitic propaganda in Romania. Other writers, both Jewish and non-Jewish, took Goma to task for his
attempt to equate the communist persecutions (the Red Holocaust) with
the Nazi Holocaust, and implying a Jewish culpability in the former. In a more
balanced intervention, the exiled writer and critic Dan Culcer argues that
Gomas historical reconstruction of the period 19401941 in Saptamna rosie
and in a section of his Journal must be regarded as the work of a writer rather
than a historian, who starts from an extensive documentation to build a narrative that may be historically questionable. Culcer further argues that Goma
hastily connects by way of a narrative of revenge, the anti-Jewish pogroms
of 1941 to the anti-Romanian terrorism of 1940, but he finds this connection
to be more an error of logic than a proof of his anti-Semitism. He praises
Gomas broader effort to bring into discussion the communist persecutions
during the Stalinist period, which was supported by the Jewish Bolshevik elite
but targeted all ethnic groups in Romania, including Jews. Beyond the controversy that Gomas recent work has triggered, there is a certain irony in
applying the label of anti-Semitism to him, since Ceausescus regime, in its
ferocious campaign to undermine his credibility as a dissident, accused him of
being simultaneously a fascist, a homosexual, a philo-Semite (through his wife)
and anti-Semite (Goma Riposta). It is true that Goma himself seems to seek
rather than shun controversy on all levels, accusing in turn his accusers and
imputing them ulterior motives.
Today, Paul Gomas fiction and documentary literature on the communist
terror can be discussed as part of a larger post-1989 trend to memorialize the
suffering in the communist prisons and concentration camps of Aiud, Gherla,
Sighet, Jilava, and Pitesti.
The trend includes the journals and documentary works published by Ion
Ioanid, Nicolae Steinhardt, Corneliu Coposu, Belu Zilber, Lena Constante,
and Nicolae Balota, as well as the television series Memorialul durerii
(Memorial to Pain), shown on State Television beginning in 1991 by filmmaker Lucia Hossu-Longin. There is now even a journal dedicated to the victims of communism: Memoria, edited by poet Mircea Dinescu for the Association of the Former Political Detainees from Romania (AFDPR). The
establishment of a National Council for the Investigation of the Securitate
Archives (CNSAS) in 2000 has provided the formerly persecuted individuals
with access to their Securitate files, while also revealing the names of those
364
who had collaborated with the communist institutions of repression. However, as Edward Kanterian has pointed out, the systematic research on the
totalitarian era has been slowed down by the hesitant opening of the archives
and the lack of a longer-term approach to this analysis. One exception is the
book series Procesul Comunismului (Communism on Trial) edited by
Doina Jela for the Humanitas Press since 1998. Jelas own Lexiconul negru
(Black Dictionary; 2001) provides documentation on 1,700 of Dejs and Ceausescus henchmen, from Securitate officers to prison guards, torturers, judges,
doctors, and even cleaning women all of whom made the Stalinist machinery
of murder work. Also important for refocusing attention on the history of
communist terror is the Memorial to the Victims of Communism and Its Resistance, established by poet-essayist Ana Blandiana and her husband Romulus Rusan in Sighetul Marmatiei (in northern Transylvania), where one of the
earliest concentration camps was set up in 1948. Blandiana and Rusan also
opened in Bucharest an International Center for the Study of Communism,
which has initiated a taped collection of oral narratives and interviews with
victims of communism.
As part of this process of anamnesis, Gomas work adds an important dimension to the memorialization of suffering under communism but also to the
exploration of exilic experience. Goma continues to remain a controversial
writer, denied by some, rediscovered by others a paradigmatic case that tells
us as much about the ambivalent politics of writing as about the value of his
work. Though Elvira Iliescu and Mariana Sipos have published in 2005 two
different books about Goma, it is perhaps too early to offer an objective assessment of his literary and cultural contribution. As Ovidiu Nimigean argues:
His contested, tortured and heroic existence remains one of the few reasons of optimism, proving that the countrys cultural organism can still secrete vigorous antibodies,
that it has not yet been overwhelmed by cancerous growth. In time, things will clarify,
and another generation that will owe nothing to the present literary barons will do justice
to Paul Goma (and to itself), discovering in his books both the bestiary of several monstrous decades, but also an almost implausible model of upright humanity.
Radu Paraschivescu offers this Goma portrait, emphasizing its rough but
consistent contours:
Confrontational down to his finger nails, hard-headed with a fixed stare and clenched
jaws, Goma is sometimes difficult to digest and easy to hate. He easily makes enemies
and does not practice the art of compromise. He has an aggressiveness that invites you
to keep your distance, and he is not euphoric. He often judges hastily and unfairly. []
But Paul Goma is one of the decisive moral gains of the last decades. [] The fact that
he survived with dignity all [his persecutions] is a minimal sign of comfort for all those
who still believe in our chance as a nation.
365
Works Cited
Andreescu, Gabriel. Goma si tema antisemitismului (Goma and the Theme of Anti-Semitism). Ziua 3249 (February 17, 2005). Accessed online on Sept. 28, 2007, at: http://
www.ziua.net/display.php?id=169748&data=2005-02-17&ziua=2bd5b7026bde1020c8
1c2fd5eb84e9c0.
Antonesei, Liviu. Jurnal din anii ciumei: 19871989. ncercare de sociologie spontana (Diary from the
Years of the Plague: 19871989. Attempt at Spontaneous Sociology). Iasi: Polirom, 1995.
Buzura, Augustin. Acolo, la Louisville (Kentucky), a nceput seria marilor mele chiolhanuri: suc de mere si iaurt (There, in Louisville, My Series of Great Feasts Was
Launched: Feasts with Apple Juice and Yoghurt ) Interview with C. Stanescu in Adevarul (2002). http://obrega.tripod.com/pgreferinte.html
Balta, Nicolae. Rezumatul unei detentii (The Summary of a Detention). Contrapunct 25
(1991).
Cesereanu, Ruxandra. Gulagul n constiinta romneasca: Memorialistica si literatura nchisorilor si lagarelor comuniste (The Gulag in the Romanian Consciousness: Memoirs and the Literature
of Communist Prisons and Camps). Bucharest: Polirom, 2005.
Culcer, Dan. Pledoarie pentru Goma (Plea for Goma). Ziua 3870 (March 3, 2007).
Deletant, Denis. Ceausescu si securitatea. Constrngere si disidenta n Romnia anilor 19651989
(Ceausescu and the Political Police: Constraint and Dissidence in 19651989 Romania).
Bucharest: Humanitas, 1998.
Diac, Cristina. Cazul Goma (The Goma Case). Jurnalul national (National Journal),
March 13, 2007. Accessed pnline at http://www.jurnalul.ro/, Sept. 28, 2007.
Diaconu, Virgil. Curajul propriilor opinii (The Courage of Ones Opinions: Interview with Liviu Ioan Stoiciu). Cafeneaua literara (Literary Caf) 3: 910/2930 (Sept.Oct. 2005.
Dutu, Alexandru, and Constantin Botoran. Situatia evreilor din Romnia (The Situation of
Jews in Romania). Vol. 1, 19311941. Bucharest: Tara Noastra, 2003.
Funderbank, David B. Pinstripes and Reds. Washington, DC: Selous Foundation Press,
1987.
Gabanyi, Anneli Ute. Literatura si politica n Romnia dupa 1945 (Literature and Politics in Romania after 1945). Bucharest: Editura Fundatiei culturale romne, 2001. Trans. Irina
Cristescu from Partei und Literatur in Rumniein seit 1955. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1975.
Gheorghiu, Mihai Dinu. LHonneur perdu dun dissident Roumaine (The Lost Honor of
a Romanian Dissident). Le Monde (May 29, 2007).
Goma, Paul. Lart de la fugue. Paris: Julliard, 1990. Arta refugii: o copilarie transilvana (The Art of
Refuge/Taking Flight Again: A Transylvanian Childhood). Cluj-Napoca: Dacia, 1991.
Chisinau: Basarabia, 1995; Bucharest: Anamarol, 2007.
Goma, Paul. Bonifacia. Trans. from the Romanian manuscript A. Paruit. Paris: Albin Michel,
1987. Romanian edition, Bucharest: Omega, 1991; Bucharest: Anamarol, 2006.
Goma, Paul. Le calidor. Trans. from the Romanian manuscript A. Paruit. Paris: Albin Michel,
1989. Din calidor: O copilarie basarabeana (From the Porch: A Bessarabian Childhood).
Dietzenback: 1989; Bucharest: Polirom, 2004. My Childhood at the Gate of Unrest: A Romanian Memoir. Trans. Angela Clark. New York: Readers International, 1990.
Goma, Paul. Camera de alaturi (The Adjoining Room). Bucharest, 1968.
Goma, Paul. Chass-crois. Trans. from the Romanian manuscript A. Paruit. Paris: Gallimard,
1983. Romanian edition, Soldatul cinelui (The Dogs Soldier). Bucharest: Humanitas,
1991.
366
Goma, Paul. Les Chiens de mort, ou, La passion selon Pitesti (The Dogs of Death, or The
Passions in the Pitesti Version). Paris: Hachette, 1981. German edition, Kln: Thule,
1984. Romanian ed. under the title Patimile dupa Pitesti. Bucharest: Cartea Romneasca,
1990. 2nd edition, Cluj-Napoca: Dacia, 1999.
Goma, Paul. Dans le cercle (Within the Circle). Trans. from the Romanian manuscript
Yvonne Krall. Paris: Gallimard, 1977. Romanian edition, n cerc. Bucharest: 1995.
Goma, Paul. Garda inverse (Reverse Guard). Trans. from the Romanian manuscript S. Cristovici. Paris: 1979. Romanian edition, Garda inversa. Bucharest: Univers, 1997.
Goma, Paul. Gherla. Afterword (Le Phnomne concentrationnaire en Roumanie) by Virgil Ierunca. Paris: Gallimard, 1976. Romanian ed.: Gherla. Bucharest: Humanitas, 1990.
Online edition titled Gherla/Latesti at Gomasite.html. Accessed on October 3, 2007.
Goma, Paul. Justa. Bucharest: Nemira, 1995.
Goma, Paul. Jurnal. 3 vols. Bucharest: Nemira, 1997. Vol. 4, Jurnal de apocrif (Apocryphal
Journal). Bucharest: Nemira, 1997.
Goma, Paul. Jurnalul unui jurnal (The Journal of a Journal). Cluj-Napoca: Dacia, 1998.
Goma, Paul. Ostinato. Trans. Marie-Thrse Kerschbaumer into German. Frankfurt/M.:
Suhrkamp, 1971. Trans. A. Paruit into French as La cellule des librables (The Cell of Those
who can be Freed). Paris: 1971. Romanian edition: Ostinato. Bucharest: Univers, 1992.
Goma, Paul. Riposta data propostei lui M.D. Gheorghiu (Response Given to M. D. Gheorghius Preponse). June 26, 2007. Online at Gomasite.html. Accessed Oct. 5, 2007.
Goma, Paul. Die Rote Messe. German trans. L. Grigorowitsch. Kln: Thule, 1984. Romanian
ed.: Saptamna rosie 28 iunie 3 iulie sau Basarabia si Evreii (The Red Month: June 28-July
3rd or Bessarabia and the Jews). Chisinau/Chishinev: Museum, 2003; Bucharest: Criterion, 2003. Rpt. Bucharest: Vremea, 2004. Online at Gomasite.html. Accessed Oct.
10, 2007.
Goma, Paul. Scrisuri, 19721998 (Writings 19721998). Bucharest: Nemira, 1999.
Goma, Paul. Le tremblement des hommes: peut-on vivre en Roumanie aujourdhui? (Quaking Men:
Can One Live Today in Romania?). Trans. A. Paruit from the Romanian manuscript.
Paris: Seuil, 1979. Romanian ed., with additional documents from the Securitate files,
19571977: Culoarea curcubeului 77Cod Barbosul (The Color of the Rainbow 77; Code
Name The Bearded One). Iasi: Polirom, 2005.
Goma, Paul. Usa noastra cea de toate zilele (Our Daily Door). Trans. Marie-Thrse Kerschbaumer into German as Die Tr. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1972. Trans. A. Paruit into
French as Elles taient quatre (They Were Four ). Paris: Gallimard, 1974. First Romanian ed., Bucharest: Cartea Romneasca, 1992.
Haraszti, Mikls. The Velvet Prison: Artists under State Socialism. Trans. from the Hungarian Katalin and Stephen Landesmann. Foreword George Konrd. New York: Basic Books,
1987.
Iliescu, Elvira. Paul Goma 70 (Paul Goma at 70). Bucharest: Criterion, 2005.
Jela, Diona. Lexiconul negru. Un elte ale represiunii communiste (Black Dictionary. Instruments of
Communist Repression). Bucharest: Humanitas, 2001.
Kanterian, Edward. Knowing Where the Graves Are: How Romania Has Begun to Deal
With Its Communist Past. Neue Zrcher Zeitung ( June 24, 2002). Accessed on line at
http://www.draculascastle.com/html/cgulag1.html. September 22, 2007.
Laszlo, Alexandru. Paul Goma25 de ani de exil? (Paul Goma: 25 Years of Exile?). http:/
/ournet.md/~paulgoma. Accessed Sept. 29, 2007.
Lovinescu, Monica. Unde scurte I. Jurnal indirect (Short Waves, Vol. I: Indirect Journal). Bucharest: Humanitas, 1990.
367
Manolescu, Nicolae. Adio domnule Goma (Farewell, Mr. Goma). Romnia literara (December 28, 1998): 3.
Nimigean, Ovidiu. Paul Goma. Nici mai mult si nici mai putin (Paul Goma: No More, No
Less). Timpul (Iasi) December 12, 2005. Online at http://www.timpul.ro/pdfs/
12-05.pdf. Accessed September 22, 2007.
Pacepa, Lieutenant-General Ion Mihai. Red Horizons. Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway,
1987.
Paraschivescu, Radu. Obiectiv Barbosul (Target: the Bearded One). Evenimentul Zilei
(Event of the Day). November 21, 2005. http://www.evz.ro/mass-media/?news_
id=203921. Accessed Sept. 22, 2007.
Pitu, Luca. Lettre a un ami occidental, suive de Texticules divers et ondoyants (Letter to a Friend in
the West. Followed by Diverse Short and Ondulating Little Texts). Rev. ed. Iasi: Timpul, 2004.
Sipos, Mariana. Destinul unui dizident: Paul Goma (Paul Goma: Destiny of a Dissident). Bucharest: Universal Dalsi, 2005.
Vianu, Lidia. Censorship in Romania. Budapest: Central European UP, 1998.
368
Writing and Internal Exile in Eastern Europe:

The Example of Imre Kertsz
Susan Rubin Suleiman
Exile can be defined as a condition where one is not home, or far from
home, whether by choice or because one is condemned to it and sometimes its hard to tell the difference. The great classical example of exile, the
poet Ovid, was banished from Rome by Emperor Augustus in A.D. 8. He was
probably the first great writer to suffer the pangs of exile, or at least to write
about it and he died without ever seeing Rome again.
In what I am calling internal exile, by contrast, one can be geographically at
home and still feel like a stranger. A feeling of estrangement from home and
society is one of the hallmarks (perhaps the hallmark) of modernist literary
self-consciousness. From Baudelaires prose poem Ltranger (The
Stranger; 1862) to Camus novel by the same title (1942) and beyond, one
finds major expressions of this kind of internal exile in modernist writing. Indeed, the figure of the estranged individual, usually a man, has been an emblem for the modern intellectual and poet, as well as for the modern Everyman. The condition of estrangement can be lived negatively, as an existential
burden, or else positively, as a liberating choice or even neutrally, as the unquestioned condition one is born to. Thomas Manns Tonio Krger, an intellectual, wishes he could be like the blond, blue-eyed people who seem so uncomplicatedly at home in the world, but he knows that he is condemned to be
an outsider: he lives his estrangement negatively, albeit with a certain pride.
Camuss Meursault begins by being neutral, but in the end he positively welcomes his estrangement from every kind of societal and even interpersonal
expectation.
Philosophers too have analyzed, and often celebrated, what I am calling
modernist or existential estrangement. Theodor Adorno wrote in one of his
famous aphorisms that it is part of morality not to be at home in ones home
(39). And the cultural critic Victor Burgin has noted that Most of us know
the melancholy tension of separation from our origins (29).
It will not be a surprise that often, in the discourse on existential estrangement, the figure of the wandering Jew appears. Whether a positive symbol
Writing and Internal Exile in Eastern Europe (Susan Rubin Suleiman)
369
or an anti-Semitic stereotype, the Jew who has no home or who is at home

everywhere, which is simply the flip side of homelessness has been a longstanding figure embodying modern restlessness and uprootedness. Joyce intimated this idea in his choice of the urban walker Leopold Bloom as his everyman; the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot reiterated it in his notion of
tre-Juif (being-Jewish), which he saw as a synonym for nomadic movement
(183). The Polish-Jewish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman who lives and writes
in England has called the Jew in Kafkas works the universal stranger, at
whose experience strangers of all walks of life could look [] as a mirror and
see the blurred and vaguely conveyed details of their own likeness (27).
All this is, of course, well known: modernist existential estrangement,
whether embodied in Jewish figures or others, is practically a clich as well
as, one should note, a continuing subject of reflection and fascination. In this
essay, I want to explore a somewhat different kind of internal exile, one that is
still tied to the condition of modernity but that is also specific to the postWorld War II situation of Eastern Europe or, to be more exact, to the situation of Eastern Europe between the Iron Curtains descent in the late 1940s
and its abrupt lifting in 1989. The phrase internal exile was used for the first
time in relation to Nazi Germany, to designate non-Jewish intellectuals who
did not emigrate as a sign of protest when Hitler came to power; in that context it had quite ambiguous resonances, since some who did not emigrate
were not really anti-Nazi, while others were (see the introductory essay of this
volume). A similar ambiguity can be said to exist in Eastern Europe under
Communism as well. After the war, the East-European countries came under
communist rule, and some writers left for the West, either in the late 1940s or
thereafter, either by choice or by force; others, the great majority, chose to stay
and accommodated themselves to a greater or lesser degree to the dominant
regime. It is among some of these writers that one can speak of the phenomenon of internal exile.
I will focus on the example of Imre Kertsz, because he presents a particularly complex version of internal exile, both in his career and in his writings.
The word exile (szmuzets) occurs often in Kertszs essays and autobiographical writings, while ironic detachment (which can be considered a stylized version of existential estrangement) is both a recurrent theme and a
characteristic mode of narration in his fiction. Another fact that makes Kertszs example compelling is that he is a writer of the Holocaust, best known
for his novel Sorstalansg (Fatelessness; 1975), based on his experience as an
adolescent deported to Auschwitz; deportation was also a kind of exile, a
brutal, forced exile from which nobody was expected to return. One question
we can ask is: How does the experience of the Holocaust inflect Kertszs
370
views and writings about the phenomenon of internal exile under Communism? Another question is: what happens to his views and writings about internal exile after the fall of Communism? His being awarded the Nobel Prize
for Literature in 2002, the first Hungarian writer to be awarded that prize, is
obviously relevant to this discussion and accounts for the fact that I can
safely assume that most readers of this essay have at least some idea of who
Imre Kertsz is.
I will begin by briefly comparing Kertszs career to those of other Hungarian writers who are associated with some form of exile. After that, I will
consider the question of internal exile as it is treated in some of Kertszs
autobiographical works and essays, which are less well-known both in Hungary and abroad than his novels.
1. Shapes of Exile
By way of comparison, let us consider a few other Hungarian writers who, like
Kertsz, were born before the communist regime and who represent various
types of exile, both external and internal. First, two external exiles who left
the country after 1948: Sndor Mrai is, along with Kertsz, probably the
most widely read and translated Hungarian writer in the West today due, no
doubt, to the enormous world-wide success of his short novel A Gyertyk csonkig gnek (Candles Burn to their Stump; 1942) after it appeared in English
translation under the title Embers in 2001. Mrai traveled widely in Europe as a
correspondent for Hungarian newspapers in the 1920s, then returned to
Hungary and started writing novels. He was a democratic anti-fascist, and left
the country definitively after the communist takeover of 1948, eventually settling in the United States for more than three decades; between 1967 and 1980
he lived in Salerno, Italy. He is a classic example of the political exile who continued to write in his native language during all his years abroad and continued
to be vitally interested in what was going on back home, even though he
never set foot in Hungary again. He published many books (in particular, his
journals) in Hungarian during his years of exile, mainly in the U.S. and Canada;
in Hungary, his works started to be published only in 1990, but today he is one
of the countrys most venerated writers.
Gyrgy Faludy is a variation on the political exile, similar to Mrai in some
respects as far as his career goes (see the introductory essay of this volume).
He actually fought on the Allied side in World War II, but returned to Hungary in 1946. Unlike Mrai, who left in 1948 after the communists came to
power, Faludy had hopes in socialism after the war but was imprisoned from
371
1949 to 1953 on trumped-up charges, during the harshest years of the regime.
After his release, he could no longer publish his own works but earned his living as a translator. In 1956, he left the country like so many others, and after
living in various European cities, in 1967 he settled in Toronto, where he published many volumes of poetry and essays in Hungarian; he also edited several
exile journals in various countries during his decades abroad. He returned to
live in Hungary in 1988, and saw his works published again and enjoyed wide
recognition in literary circles, and beyond.
Next, two internal exiles who present different profiles from Kertsz:
Bla Hamvas, an essayist and philosopher, was active in editorial and intellectual circles in Budapest between the two world wars, as well as during the
three years of postwar democracy, 194548. His philosophical position was
that of a Christian humanist. Forbidden to publish after 1948, he lost all of his
intellectual positions and worked in a warehouse his was a classic case of
forced internal exile, similar to those in the Soviet Union and other Iron Curtain countries in that period. His writings circulated in samizdat, however, and
he started to be published again posthumously, in the mid-1980s.
Gyrgy Konrd was trained as a sociologist, but became well-known as a
writer after the publication of his first novel, A ltogat (The Case-Worker) in
1969. Like Kertsz, Konrd is a secular Jew; unlike Kertsz, he has written
often and with great affection about his religious grandparents and his childhood in the provinces; he survived the Holocaust in Budapest. After his first
successes, he got into trouble with the regime because of a manuscript he wrote
in 1974 with another sociologist, Ivn Szelnyi, on intellectuals and power;
Szelnyi left the country, but Konrd chose to stay. From then on, he was published in samizdat or in censored versions. He became widely published abroad,
in German, French and English translations, and he gained world-wide recognition in the 1980s. He also became a well-known member of the democratic
opposition, the political dissidents, along with other intellectuals like Jnos
Kis; and he has continued to be active as a public intellectual after 1989. Konrd
is that interesting figure, an internal exile writer who is at the same time highly
respected as a politically dissident intellectual; paradoxically, the dissident is
part of the system, which after all tolerates dissidence up to a point (at least, that
was the case in the last decade of the communist regime in Hungary); and he is
also part of the counter-system, just as Hamvas was in an earlier and more
difficult time. We could say that while these dissident writers are tolerated outsiders as far as the official regime is concerned, they are respected insiders as far
as the intellectual culture of opposition is concerned.
With these various contrasting possibilities in mind, we may consider in detail the shape of Kertszs career and his itinerary as a writer. He was born in
372
1929 in Budapest, into a lower middle-class Jewish family that he describes at

some length in his most recent and most explicitly autobiographical book, K.
dosszi, published in 2006 (not yet published in English, but published in German in 2007). His family was in many ways typical of Budapest Jews, with the
grandparents practicing orthodox Judaism while the parents generation was
much more removed from Jewish practice. At the same time, it was Kertszs
orthodox grandfather who Magyarized the family name from Klein to Kertsz before World War I, at a time when such change was not a sign of insecurity but rather a sign of optimism, or at least of hope in the possibility of
Hungarian Jewish identity. By the time young Imre grew up, his immediate
family was much more ambivalent about its Jewish identification, especially as
his parents were divided in other ways as well; they separated when Imre was
five years old, and he spent several years in a boys home while they fought
over custody. Eventually his father won, and Imre went to live with him and
his new wife, seeing his mother on set days.
Despite the familys ambivalent Jewishness, the boy had his bar mitzvah in
1943, and was tutored for it by a rabbi. He recalls, however, that he was
dressed for the occasion in a Bocskai suit, a typical Magyar patriotic outfit
for special occasions, named after a seventeenth-century Transylvanian aristocrat! That tells us something, Kertsz writes, about the absurdity of the situation, which no one present seemed to notice at the time (K. dosszi 55). Kertsz doesnt elaborate, but assumes that his readers know the facts: by 1943,
Jews had been legally excluded from much of public life in Hungary and if
his bar mitzvah ceremony had occurred a year later, he would no doubt have
worn his Bocskai suit with a yellow star. In Sorstalansg, the Bocskai suit comes
up in a similarly absurd way when the narrator recalls, after his arrival in
Auschwitz in the summer of 1944, that he had worn such a suit to the opening
day ceremonies of his grammar school four years earlier and then adds, with
characteristically deadpan irony, that the school never taught him anything
about Auschwitz, though, under the circumstances, it would have been very
useful for him (Sorstalansg 93; Fatelessness 113).
In fact, Kertszs circumstances were unusual. Unlike most Budapest Jews,
who were spared from deportation, he was deported in July 1944, before his
fifteenth birthday, to Auschwitz and other camps. This was a kind of exile
from which very few returned. Kertsz did return in 1945 and this return
was by choice, for he was offered the possibility of emigration, like others liberated from Buchenwald. Elie Wiesel, who was liberated from the same camp,
chose not to return to his hometown Sighet in Transylvania.
Returning to Budapest, Kertsz learned that his father had died in forced
labor; but his mother survived the war, and he lived with her for several years
373
after his return. He joined the Communist Party around 1946, and stayed in it
for a few years; after graduating from high school, he worked as a journalist
until he was fired (presumably for political reasons, as the regime was then in
its harshest Stalinist phase) in early 1951. In 1953 he met a lonely, abandoned person like himself (K. dosszi 179), a woman who had just been released from a Stalinist prison; they married the same year. From then on, he
lived in what he himself has called internal emigration (A Szmuztt nyelv
93). He was unemployed for several years (supported by his wife, who worked
as a waitress), then chose again to stay in Hungary after the unsuccessful revolution of 1956 largely because by then he had decided to become a writer
and he felt attached to the language. In the early years of the Kdr regime
that came to power in 1956 with Soviet help, Kertsz wrote with a friend some
popular light comedies to support himself, an activity he has jokingly referred
to as his form of collaboration with the regime (K. dosszi 223). But his true
writing was elsewhere: from 1960 to 1973, he worked on his first novel, Sorstalansg (1975); and he also started writing his intellectual and spiritual diary,
Glyanapl (Galley Diary), which he continued through the change (as Hungarians call the fall of Communism) until 1991 and which was published in
1992. Meanwhile, from the 1980s on, he earned a living by doing translations
from German.
As is clear in Kertszs autobiographical essays and in Glyanapl, which I
will discuss shortly, Kertsz considered himself to be a total outsider under
the Kdr regime, not only politically but also in terms of the intellectual culture, whether it was the official culture or the culture of the dissidents like
Konrd. Some scholars have disputed this claim, pointing out that Sorstalansg
received a couple of very good reviews when it was published. Nevertheless,
the book remained unknown for many years, both inside and outside Hungary; in 1983, the rising young writer Gyrgy Spir published a long article in
the influential weekly let s Irodalom, in which he noted that this novel about
fatelessness had itself had a negative fate by remaining so ignored (5). It is true
that Kertsz was partly responsible for his obscurity, since he published very
little in the decade after Sorstalansg; but even in the early 1990s, after he had
become much more prolific and better known, and his works had started to
be translated, Erno Kulcsr Szabs influential scholarly history of postwar
Hungarian literature (published in 1993) never even mentioned his name.
All this changed, of course, after the Nobel Prize; today Kertszs work figures prominently in the canon of Hungarian literature, is taught in schools,
and is the subject of a great deal of scholarly work by both Hungarian and
non-Hungarian critics (see Ttsy de Zepetneks Bibliography from 2005
much more has been published since then). Interestingly, however, after
374
choosing to remain in Hungary during the harshest periods, when both external and internal exile mattered a great deal, Kertsz has chosen in recent
years to live mainly outside Hungary; since 2000, he has spent most of his
time in Berlin. But then, the concept of exile has also changed. In a way, there
are no more exiles in what we call the West (which includes Eastern Europe);
the true exiles are now from or in countries like Iran, Nigeria, or China. In
Europe and the United States, there are only the usual nomadic intellectuals
living their modernist estrangement, whether at home or abroad.
2. Auschwitz and the Kdr Regime:

Kertsz on Internal Exile
I want now to look at the question of internal exile in greater depth, through
some of Kertszs own reflections on it. In 1996, he gave a speech in Munich
titled Homeland, Home, Country (Haza, Otthon, Orszg), later published in a volume titled A Szmuztt Nyelv (The Exiled Tongue). Its not clear
what language the speech was delivered in, but very likely it was in German.
Kertsz writes: There exists a country where I was born, whose citizen I am,
and especially whose beautiful language I speak and read, and write my books
in; this country, however, has never been mine, has never belonged to me
rather, I belonged to it, and for four decades it proved to be much more my
prison than my homeland (Szmuztt Nyelv 103; my translation, here and elsewhere unless otherwise stated). This essay contains some of Kertszs most
pessimistic statements about his relation to Hungary, and Ill come back to it
later. First, I want to take a closer look at this idea of the native land as a
prison, which he developed on a daily basis over a thirty-year period in Glyanapl. As the books title states, this is a galley-diary, a diary of imprisonment. And yet, the diary also offers a paradox: the condition of imprisonment
leads, strangely, to a sense of personal freedom.
The diary starts in 1961, a year after Kertsz had started writing a novel
(Glyanapl 9). And the striking thing is how firm his ideas were already at this
date. In one sense, he was totally lost, thats how he looks back on that period
in K. dosszi. But reading the diary, one has the feeling that he had very clear
ideas about literature, as well as about his own relation to the system. What
is evident from the start is his scorn for conformism and what he calls the
functional man. He knows that his own relation to the system is that of an
outsider, and he also knows (here is the paradox) that this status of outsider is
his by choice as much as by necessity. Or, if you will, it is his by an internal
necessity: he can do no other. Furthermore, the choice to stay outside the sys-
375
tem is intimately linked to considerations of writing and the practice of literature. One of the very first entries in the diary states: Lives deprived of truth,
functional lives, are not appropriate subjects of literature. In their fate nothingness shines through, since such fates lack the meaning that makes tragedy possible (1011).
A fate worth living is one that admits the possibility of tragedy which
means, among other things, that it is an individual fate. Kertszs deep suspicion and rejection of collective solutions be they political, religious, or any
other form of collective determination is stated repeatedly, from the very
start of the diary; and it refers to both life and literature. Thus he writes in
1963:
If society solves all ethical dilemmas through the collective, then only the barest subsistence remains. The order is: you may worry about all of lifes problems, but the problem
of life itself you may not worry about. [] However, under these circumstances, an art
(literature) that wants to see only lifes problems instead of the problem of life becomes
itself a functional, conformist, superficial art instead of a real one. What is talent worth,
in that case? Nothing but a disadvantage, a burden. (11)
Two years later, in 1965, he formulates the problem in existential terms: individual fate is only possible through a refusal of designations imposed from
the outside, by a collective. In a difficult entry dated (by an ironic coincidence)
May 1, he writes:
What do I call fate? In any case, the possibility of tragedy. But the external designation,
the stigma which forces our life into absurdity in a particular situation of totalitarianism,
interferes with this: therefore, if we live the designation that is pinned on us as truth, instead of living the necessity that follows from our own (relative) freedom, that is what I
would call fatelessness. (19)
In other words, the problem is how to create your own fate instead of allowing
a system to pin it on you for a pinned on fate is in fact fatelessness.
Freedom which he recognizes as always relative, an ideal rather than a fact
consists in designating your own fate, independently of (or in opposition to)
socially or collectively imposed designations. It is only by exiling himself from
the designations imposed by the collective that Kertsz can save himself, both
as an individual and as a writer. Soon after the above remarks, he notes the following about writing: Its not some kind of talent that makes one a writer, but
rather that one doesnt accept the language and ready-made ideas (20). Just
like the man who wants to create his own fate instead of letting a fateless fate
be imposed on him, the true writer is one who refuses the language of the collective even when that language purports to express noble ideas such as
humanism. This idea is formulated in a striking image a few years later, in
1973: The executioners cannot stand the complaints of the beaten. Just as
376
they put on music in the torture chambers to cover the screams of the tortured, so they cover over truths muffled murmur by the cheap chatter of socalled humanist literature (3637).
We could say, then, that Kertszs project as a writer is to try and render
truths muffled murmur, over and against the cheap chatter of received
ideas, be they humanist or any other form of official art. This project is indissociable from the existential project of seeking to live your own fate, which
under totalitarianism involves embracing estrangement as the only possible
condition. One of the most striking entries in the diary is the emphatic, isolated sentence dated 1975, shortly after the publication of Sorstalansg: Az n
orszgom a szmuzets (51) My country is exile.
What relation does Auschwitz have to these reflections? In fact, Kertsz
ascribes all of his preoccupations and all his thinking to an origin in Auschwitz. He writes in 1973: Whatever I think about, I am still thinking about
Auschwitz. Even if apparently I am speaking about something else, even then
I am speaking about Auschwitz [] Everything else appears vacuous by comparison. And its certain, quite certain, that this is not only for personal reasons. For Auschwitz, he continues, was European mans greatest trauma
since the cross (36). This juxtaposing of Auschwitz with the cross may seem
shocking, but Kertsz maintains it he specifically comes back to it in K. doszszi. Whatever one thinks of this, it reflects Kertszs deep conviction (stated
in a number of essays in the 1990s) that the Holocaust was a universal European trauma, not just a Jewish one.
This universalist view brings Kertsz into conflict with certain theorists of
the Holocaust who insist on its uniquely Jewish significance. Or we might say
that it makes him appear as an outsider even in relation to Jewishness at least
as conceived by some Jews. Critics have noted that the way Kertsz describes
the reactions of his protagonist in Sorstalansg makes him appear, to some Jewish readers, like an anti-Semitic or self-hating Jew (Sanders 70506). There
is the famous passage, often quoted, where Gyuri recounts how he feels completely excluded by the Yiddish-speaking Jews in the Zeitz camp, who accuse
him of not being a real Jew because he does not speak Yiddish. This makes
him feel the way he used to feel back in Hungary, not quite like the people
around him in other words, like a Jew. This is an odd feeling to have, he says,
in the midst of Jews, in a concentration camp! (Sorstalansg, 114; Fatelessness,
140) In a recent interview with Tibor Fischer, Kertsz recalled that in 1975
[t]here were two publishers in socialist Hungary. One rejected it [the novel]
on the grounds that it was anti-Semitic. I still have the letter (20).
What is important to note here other than the awful irony of this situation is the way Kertsz uses his experience as a non-Jewish Jew to arrive
377
at what he calls the universal human experience under totalitarianism. In

Glyanapl, after insisting that he has never felt Jewish, any more than Buddhist or Muslim, he writes (in an entry from 1975):
But on account of my Jewishness I still lived through something, which is the universal
experience of people under totalitarianism. If I am Jewish, then, I say that I am negation,
the negation of all human pride, of certainty, of quiet nights and peaceful inner life, of
conformism, of free elections, of national glory in the book of victories I am the black
page, where no writing appears; I am negation, not a Jewish but a universal human negation, the writing on the wall of total oppression. (61)
Ivan Sanders reads this passage as Kertszs most radical disavowal of Jewishness, as well as the most shocking one to those, mostly American Jews, who
accuse him of being a self-hating Jew (705). But it can also be read, paradoxically, as an affirmation, or at least as something positive: the negation of
conformism, pride, and certainty turns into a writing on the wall, a warning perhaps even a kind of resistance. Gyuri, the protagonist-narrator of Sorstalansg, refuses to join any discourse of certainty upon returning from Buchenwald. He is as ironically distant from the man we would now call a
Holocaust denier, who asks him whether he personally saw any gas chambers
(which is horrible and hilarious, if one thinks about it; Gyuri simply replies
that No, he has no personal experience of the gas chamber) as he is from the
left-wing journalist who wants him to recount his experiences so that the
guilty will be punished (Sorstalansg 201; Fatelessness 251).
The possibility that negation can be a writing on the wall of oppression
raises the question of whether Kertszs brand of internal exile can be regarded as political. He himself has explained, in K. dosszi, that he was outside
every kind of official circle during the Kdr regime, including the circle of
tolerated dissidents (242). But a number of notations in the diary suggest
that his thinking is profoundly political. His reading of Kafkas The Castle, for
example, argues that Kafkas K. does not wish to settle in the village and become integrated, as some critics claim. On the contrary, what K. seeks is to
unsettle the system, according to which only some people can enter the castle,
those who observe certain rules and conditions. They accept a given order, a
rule of the game, and base their lives on it, as if that order were the order of life
or of nature. K.s freedom resides in his decision to enter the castle (Glyanapl, 65). As to why K. decides to enter the castle: because of the paradigm,
because he wants to break the order of the world (67). The castle is the image
of collectively accepted slavery, Kertsz says, and that is precisely what K.
wants to break.
So there is political meaning (though not official dissident meaning) in
Kertszs brand of estrangement. In 1982, we find this notation in the diary:
378
In this collective world [], to remain a private person and to keep on being
a private person; at this point I could hardly think of a more heroic enterprise
(147). He comes back to this again in 1985, when he insists that the only true
non-conformism consists in taking or at least attempting to take ones life
completely out of the hands of the system (rendszer), of all systems. Everything in the system acts against such an attempt, but one must show the
crack where the individual life shoots up, like a blade of grass among stones,
because that crack exists (225). In other words, the system is not totally foolproof it is possible to find cracks in it. But who must show these cracks,
and how? One answer may be found a few pages later: From far away, far
away, everything from very very far away. Cooling off what is boiling, abstracting what was alive. To look at the world that way: Auschwitz! Oh, there we
have everything thats needed for a good book! (228) This is a wonderful
comment on Kertszs own style, his estrangement from received ideas and
from everyday, smooth language. The only way to understand or describe
Auschwitz or any totalitarian system, but it was Auschwitz that taught him
this is by means of a detached irony, which allows one to see things from
very very far away. Or we could say that it is only by means of a highly stylized literary language that one can approach the most traumatic reality. Later
still, he writes: The concentration camp can only be imagined as a literary
text, not as reality. (Not even and maybe especially not even when we are
living it) (287).
To come back to the question of politics, it would appear that Kertsz both
claims a resistance to totalitarian systems that can only be thought of as political, and refuses the everyday politics of dissidence. Hence his remark, in
September 1989, differentiating himself from the dissidents:
I must be crazy, to be thinking about art. On the other hand, there is no point in thinking
about anything else. Whats the difference between them and me? They oppose the regime (or regimes), while what I oppose is, as I might put it, God. Someone who opposes
a regime must believe in a different regime. Someone who opposes God doesnt have to
believe, but simply live before his eyes: thats quite enough for belief. (299)
In sum, Kertsz is interested not in regimes but in a much more fundamental human condition. But still, the preoccupation with mans place in the universe as one might rephrase his idea about living before Gods eyes is in
his case indissociable from his personal experience of the two dominant totalitarianisms of the twentieth century. As Kertsz has repeatedly and provocatively stated, Nazism and Communism are in a curious way mirror
images of each other. Sorstalansg should be read, he has stated with provocation, not as a Holocaust novel but as a novel about the Kdr regime (K. dosszi
8486).
379
3. After Communism
Earlier, I asked: what happened to Kertszs views and writings about internal
exile after the fall of Communism? The answer is complicated, in part because
the fall of Communism coincided with Kertszs own increasing visibility on
the international literary scene so in one sense, he appeared as less and less
of an outsider in the context of world literature. Indeed, he now appears as
one of those rare and highly privileged writers from small countries who find
a world-wide audience. It is therefore all the more striking to note how alienated Kertsz feels in post-communist Hungary at least, that is the way his
feelings are expressed in his writings. In one sense, we could say that after
Communism, he reconnects with the feeling of existential estrangement that
has been his ever since he was a child. Thus in April 1990, he writes in his
diary: the recent political events freed me from politics, and gave me back to
my familiar, everyday exile (Glyanapl 313). But at the same time, it is in
post-communist Hungary that he feels most specifically estranged as a Jew. In
a striking passage of his book Valaki Ms: A Vltozs Krnikja (Somebody
Else: Chronicle of the Change), published in 1997, he relates how one day
around the time of the patriotic national holiday (March 15), as he is riding the
tramway that goes from Moszkva tr to the Margit Bridge, he sees a bunch of
young men marching in black boots, carrying objects that look like guns
under their arms. Everything about them their movements, their faces, their
voices reminds him of the 1940s. He does not explain, but does not need to,
since we know full well what the 1940s evoke for Kertsz not so much (or
not only) deportation, but exclusion, separation into a special category: the
Jewish class in school, the yellow star. It would seem that to him post-communist Hungary, rather than representing liberation, represents regression to
a hateful past. In the essay I quoted earlier, Haza, otthon, orszg, written
around the same time as Valaki ms, he again evokes memories of the 1940s.
The word haza (homeland), scares him, he says, because he was taught quite
early that my best way of serving my homeland was to do forced labor, after
which I would be exterminated (Szmuztt nyelv 97). A few pages later, he recalls how happy he was when he stood on the street in June 1944 wearing his
yellow star, reading the newspaper about the Allied landing in Normandy. But
suddenly he felt that people were looking at him, precisely because of his
manifestation of joy: Its indescribable how I felt, when I suddenly realized
my situation: it was like a sudden fall into the depths of defenselessness, fear,
loathing, estrangement, disgust, and exclusion (102).
We can call this kind of dj-vu (equating the 1990s with the 1940s) irrational
on Kertszs part, but its also true that one sign of democratization in post-
380
communist Hungary has been the possibility and the reality of open expressions of anti-Semitism, which had been squashed during the communist
years. In an important essay published in 2001 in let s Irodalom, Kertsz
alludes to this with some irony. He remarks that his second wife, who spent
many years in the United States (he married Magda in 1996, after the death of
his wife Albina), has noticed that he behaves a lot more freely abroad than
at home: Abroad I move comfortably, like one who is at home, while at
home I move like a foreigner. With foreigners I speak freely, with my own
countrymen Im tense. All this was a natural condition under the so-called socialist dictatorship, with which I coped fairly well; but democratic racism,
I have to get used to (nmeghatrozs). A sentence from Glyanapl,
written in 1990, sums it all up: Hungary has been freed from bolshevism, but
not from itself (314).
Kertszs almost visceral feeling of estrangement from post-communist
Hungary, and his pessimism about it, may be irrational (or perhaps merely impatient?), just as it is irrational when he claims, as he did in the title essay of A
Szmuztt nyelv, that Hungarian for him is a borrowed language and that he
doesnt belong to the national literature of Hungary: In any case I write my
books in a host-language which, by its very nature, expels them from itself or
else tolerates them only in the margins of its consciousness (291). The reason
for this, he says, is that every language creates a collective Self, a kind of
national consensus that writers participate in; but the experiences of a Holocaust survivor, which he writes about, can only be marginal in the Hungarian
consensus. Kertszs conception of the national literature thus echoes the
pessimism one finds in his other writings of those years. It seems to him that,
by its very nature as the language of a small country that has to seek a national
consensus, the Hungarian literary language does not admit the possibility
that a Holocaust writer can be part of the national mainstream. The only way
out of this is via world literature, and specifically German. In the later, somewhat different English version of this essay, The Language of Exile, he
writes: In reality, I belong to that Jewish literature which came into being in
Eastern and Central Europe. This literature was never written in the language
of the immediate national environment and was never a part of a national literature (Language 6). He mentions Kafka and Celan and their successors,
but he forgets a detail: unlike Kafka and Celan, who wrote in German when
the national language was Czech or Romanian, he himself has written and continues to write in the language of the immediate national environment, Hungarian, which is a minority language on a global scale but not one in Hungary.
Kertsz would like to treat Hungarian as if it were a minority language, as
Deleuze and Guattari define that term in their book Kafka: pour une littrature
381
mineure, even though he is not writing in a minority language in Hungary.

Whatever his reasons for wanting to claim that he writes in Hungarian as a
stranger, and despite the fact that many Hungarian nationalists would nastily
want to agree with him about that, he is a master of the language, even when
or especially when he mistreats it and writes it with stylized awkwardness.
In that regard, his writing corresponds to Deleuzes and Guattaris notion that
in modern times, great writers have sought to write even in their own language
as if it were a foreign tongue: to become the nomad and the immigrant of
ones own language, that is the revolutionary ideal that Deleuze and Guattari derive from their reading of Kafka (Kafka 35). Kertsz won the Nobel
Prize as a Hungarian writer. The fact that he is also a world-wide writer
does not diminish his Hungarianness, just as Mrais Hungarianness is not
diminished because he is world-renown. Kertsz may feel like a stranger in
Hungary, but today, his works are part of the Hungarian canon; long left out
of histories of Hungarian literature, he figures prominently in the new threevolume literary history edited by Mihly Szegedy-Maszk, and I for one fervently hope that he will continue to be read and discussed in Hungarian as
well as in other languages.
I want to end this essay on a celebratory note, by evoking Kertszs extraordinary reflection, toward the end of Glyanapl, on a passage from Mrais
diary, which had then just been published in Budapest. In an entry in June
1990, Kertsz quotes Mrais diary from July 1944, describing the air raid on
Budapest on the night of July 23, which Mrai saw from the suburban train
as he was traveling toward the city. Kertsz remembers that on that same night
he was with the other boys who had been rounded up and taken to a suburban
brick factory before being deported, and that they had climbed up on a hill
near the fence to see what was happening when the air raid started. Mrai, in
the passage Kertsz quotes, describes the dark sky, the planes and the burning
city, and then notes that the train passed in front of the brickyard where
7,000 Jews from the Pest area are awaiting deportation, guarded by armed
guards. Kertsz then comments:
I dont know why I suddenly feel a tremendous, grateful joy that Sndor Mrai saw me.
He was forty-four, I was fourteen. He saw the child wearing the yellow star among the
racks of drying bricks; and he knew what the child did not yet know, that soon he would
be taken to Auschwitz. All this since what else could a writer do? he wrote down in
his Diary (and this Diary is, incidentally, the clearest, most compelling and most important description of that time). What does all this mean? Its hard to decipher, like a singular constellation. Still, I sense in it a deep meaning, one that is independent of both of
us and that spreads quietly in concentric circles, the way in the general uproar one can
perceive, with difficulty but unmistakably and ineffaceably, a radio wave in the air.
(31920).
382
This evocation of the radio wave is a beautiful image for the effect that a
writers work can have, across the years and across miles and oceans, on another writer. Mrai published the first volume of his Napl in Budapest in
1945, after which it did not again see publication until 1990, when Kertsz
read it in post-communist Hungary. By that time Mrai was dead, and was
soon to become one of the most highly respected writers in Hungary even
though he never set foot in the country again after 1948.
Kertsz, in his commentary, reminds us that he too was exiled once from
his native land, not by choice but by brutal force, along with thousands of
other Jews who never came back. And the beauty of it is that this reminder
about Jewish persecution occurs not through Kertszs own words or memories, but through the observations of another Hungarian writer, who chose
exile from his native land in other words, who could determine his own fate,
no matter how tragic. But Kertsz too, once his first forced exile was over, can
be said to have chosen his fate: he decided actively to stay in Hungary, when it
would have been easier to leave. Across the enormous distances in time and
space that separate them, the external exiles words unmistakable and ineffaceable, as Kertsz says reach the writer who stayed home, but whose real
country, as he tells us again and again, has always been exile.
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. Trans. E.F.N. Jephcott. London: New Left Books, 1974.
Baudelaire, Charles. LEtranger. Oeuvres Compltes. Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothque de la
Pliade, 1961. 231.
Bauman, Zygmunt. Strangers: The Social Construction of Universality and Particularity.
Telos (Winter 198889): 742.
Blanchot, Maurice. LEntretien infini (The Infinite Conversation). Paris: Gallimard, 1969.
Burgin, Victor. Paranoiac Space. Visual Anthropology Review 7:2 (1991): 2230.
Camus, Albert. LEtranger. Paris: Gallimard, 1942.
Deleuze, Gilles and Flix Guattari. Kafka. Pour une littrature mineure (Kafka. For a Minor Literature). Paris: Eds. de Minuit, 1975.
Kafka, Franz. The Castle. Trans. Edward and Willa Muir. New York: Knopf, 1941.
Kertsz, Imre. A Szmuztt nyelv (The Exiled Language). Budapest: Magveto, 2001.
Kertsz, Imre. Az nmeghatrozs szabadsga (The Freedom of Self-Determination).
let s Irodalom November 30, 2001; consulted online: http://www.es.hu/old/0148/
feuilleton.htm#kertesz
Kertsz, Imre. Glyanapl (Galley Diary). Budapest: Magveto, 1992.
Kertsz, Imre. Memoirs of a Survivor. Interview with Tibor Fischer. The Independent ( January 11, 2008): 2021.
Kertsz, Imre. K. dosszi (K. File). Budapest: Magveto, 2006.
383
Kertsz, Imre. The Language of Exile. Trans. Ivan Sanders. The Guardian (October 19,
2002): 4 and 6.
Kertsz, Imre. Sorstalansg. Budapest: Szzadvg, 1993. Trans. Tim Wilkinson as Fatelessness.
New York: Vintage, 2004.
Kertsz, Imre. Valaki ms. A Vltozs Krnikja (Somebody Else: Chronicle of the Change).
Budapest: Magveto, 1997.
Konrd, Gyrgy. A Ltogat. Budapest: Magveto, 1969. Trans. Paul Aston as The Case
Worker. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974.
Kulcsr Szab, Erno. A Magyar irodalom trtnete, 19451991 (The History of Hungarian Literature, 19451991). Budapest: Argumentum, 1993.
Mann, Thomas. Tonio Krger. 1903. Stories from Three Decades. Trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter.
New York: Knopf, 1936.
Mrai, Sndor. A Gyertyk csonkig gnek (The Candles Burn to their Stump). Budapest: Rvai,
1942. Trans. Carol Brown Janeway from the German as Embers. New York: Knopf, 2001.
Sanders, Ivan. The Question of Identity in the Novels and Essays of Imre Kertsz. In The
Holocaust in Hungary: A European Perspective. Ed. Judit Molnr. Budapest: Balassi, 2005.
Spir, Gyrgy. Non habent sua fata. let s Irodalom 27.30 (1983): 5.
Szegedy-Maszk, Mihly, ed. A Magyar irodalom trtnetei (Histories of Hungarian Literature).
3 vols. Budapest: Gondolat, 2007.
Ttsy de Zepetnek, Steven. A Bibliography of Imre Kertszs Oeuvre and Publications
about His Work. In Imre Kertsz and Holocaust Literature. Ed. Louise O. Vasvri and
Steven Ttsy de Zepetnek. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP, 2005.
384
Kunderas Paradise Lost: Paradigm of the Circle

Vladimr Papousek
Many current readings of Milan Kunderas work are provoked by the authors
visible endeavor to explain his work, to control, interpret, and define its orchestration in every language into which it is translated. Interpreters usually
try, therefore, to catch Kundera committing some kind of error, they try to
prove that Kunderas desire to control the text is extravagant and excessive,
and they tend to deconstruct Kunderas interpretation of his own work. Kundera emerges from such conflicts as an author who permanently pretends
something, an author whose work everyone knows better than he himself.
Most of these interpreters, especially the European ones, seem to be convinced essentialists, who regard a text as a mysterious code bearing some
hidden message, and an author pleading for his own interpretation as one of
those guardians whose task is to obscure the message even more.
Lets follow the path of a pragmatist who does not believe in a great hidden
truth. He is ready to trust that it is not the authors strategy to obscure his own
work and make it even more mysterious. On the contrary, the pragmatist believes that the authors endeavors are to open and illuminate sincerely his
work in order to make it most comprehensible for the reader. Let us start,
therefore, to seek an interpretative key for our reading the work in what the
author himself declares about his writing.
In the Authors Note (Poznmka autora) of the first post-1989 Czech edition
of his novel Zert (The Joke) Kundera nostalgically recalls a letter from Jan Sabata, who initiated the edition: I could see Jans father Jaroslav, whom I admired when I was sixteen and he nineteen. And I could see the very young
Milan Uhde and a walk among fields between Brno and Krlovo Pole, when
we had long conversations at the time when I wasnt yet twenty five and he
twenty. And I felt that the circle was closing (310). What does closing the
circle mean in this last sentence? I believe that the author gives here, probably
unconsciously, a very exact description of his imagination, which organizes
and primarily determines all of his works.
One could characterize Kunderas novels by a circular paradigm that includes everything and leaves nothing beyond the parameter. From Zert ( Joke)
Kundera's Paradise Lost (Vladimr Papousek)
385
to Ignorance, his novelistic characters and their destinies gyrate in closed

circles, encountering their past, meeting their former acts and mistakes that
return to hit them from an unexpected side. What should face them, attacks
from behind. The circular paradigm reveals that in Kunderas imagination a
double force seems to be in action: the imagination of an author creating his
novel, and the imagination of a narrator constructing destinies of his characters in time and space. It is as if time and history created a strong gravitational field, and every act, motion, or word returned in a new shape, following some trajectory back to the demiurges that created them.
Critics occasionally reproach Milan Kundera for returning with apparent
obsession to his native Czech space, only to show that he is inclined to find
more affinity with the universal space of French literature. However, the paradox is only apparent. In Kunderas poetics, everything has to be interconnected. The Czech motives are, therefore, merely means in the authors composition; they are merely used as material the author employs in his play of
returns and unexpected meetings, where the characters consider their journey
in time as a direct line, though it actually is a circle. We may understand circularity here as a symbol of references from effects back to causes, to nonhuman powers that paradoxically intervene into the life of characters in the
fictional world of Kunderas texts. Trying to explain these returns in a psychoanalytic manner as Kunderas nostalgic dependence on his home country,
or as an exiles trauma, does not help us much further. Kundera is as nostalgic
as anyone, sometimes less so, sometimes more, but research on the relevance
of his nostalgic feelings on his work is completely unimportant.
In the mentioned Authors Note we can read several lines further the declaration: I consider immoral for an author to offer his readers something that
he knows is imperfect and what he does not enjoy (319). Quoting from his
own essay LArt du roman, Kundera adds What do I hang on to? God? Homeland? The people? The individual? The answer is as ridiculous as sincere: I do
not hang on to anything except for the neglected heritage of Cervantes. []
Of all that I have ever written, the one thing I depend on, the only thing I
shall ever permit to be republished, are my novels (321).
It is evident from these quotations that Kundera considers a text a certain
type of a closed unit, a circle: he is concerned about the maximum possible
perfection of this entity. In his imagination, Cervantess definitive novel represents an esthetically closed shape that is here to stay, defying all streams of
time and history. However, Kundera wants to identify himself with this entity;
it does not exist in reality as a perfection given once for all, but is something
that asks for continuous care from its creator. It appears that Kundera himself
is not an essentialist. Lets call him rather an existentialist in Sartres sense. For
386
Kundera, the authors gesture of writing represents a specific image of his

own identity, of his own way of being, just as Sartres Rocquentin in La Nause
constructs his own personal history by writing about Monsieur Rollebons
history. The text of a novel is for Kundera a question of identity, a question of
his proper existence, which becomes self-evident in action, by carrying out
something, for instance writing. However, in Kunderas view, literary works
are continually threatened to remain as mere gestures because they are connected to their originator. And since these gestures aspire to perfection, an
author cannot abandon his work to history.
Kundera calls his works opuses, which points to music, one of the elementary art forms in Kunderas imagination. We shall discuss here neither the
musical environment in which he grew up, nor his fictional references to
music, nor his essayistic turns to Janacek. Instead, we shall deal with a concept
of orchestration. In Nechovejte se tu jako doma, prteli (Dont Behave here as at
your Place, my Friend) Kundera initiates his discussion of the authors right to
orchestrate his own work with a Stravinsky quotation. Orchestration provides
a tool to keep ones work in maximum perfection; it allows enclosing ones
own work in a circle, thus preventing its dissolution in the generally ignorant
and ephemeral colloquial discourses of critics, historians of literature, editors,
and imitators. Kundera seems to refuse to surrender his work to this general
misreading, because he does not want to expose himself. His efforts to protect his privacy and private identity fully correlate with his need to control the
instrumentation of his work.
Musical rhetoric or the rhetoric of music allowed Kundera to overcome
several paradoxes, for instance that he publishes his work and at the same time
considers publication a threat to his own work and identity. Every publication
posits the text in a social world of copying and misreading, whereas the author
desires to keep a closed, perfect harmony. His demand for control and instrumentation allows him to resist these problems. If playwrights are allowed to
stage their own work, authors of novels should also be able to show their idea
of the most relevant and accurate reading of their text.
While composers traditionally disposed of exactly defined tonal structures
and scales, authos of novels find themselves in a more complicated position.
Kundera overcomes this difficulty by using as his primary material an assembly of possible or thinkable gestures and attitudes of an individual towards the universe, combined with a set of imaginative representations of
possible corporeality. The patterns of causes and consequences of these attitudes, acts, and modes of corporeal presence in reality, enclosed in a circle,
compensate for the lack of musical harmonic scales in literature. The question
remains whether this relatively complicated and sophisticated method is
387
motivated only by the authors desire for a beautiful play. Is it only a matter of
aesthetics, or does it have a deeper motivation?
We have suggested that we consider Kunderas attitude existential rather
than essential, due to the authors permanent care for the appearance of his
own work. Even novel writing emerges from this existential motivation. Zdenek Kozmn had already called attention to this in the 1960s, and Kundera included Kozmns text Romn lidsk existence (The Human Existence
Novel) in the mentioned 1991 edition of Zert. Since we have decided to trust
the author, we must presuppose that he had his reasons for adopting and considering as relevant just this interpretation. To exist presupposes to be in defiance of quotidian reality, time, and history, to reflect the singularity of being.
In Kunderas novels the characters defy grand history, which cannot be harmonized and becomes the source of absurdities and paradoxes. The circles
followed by human destinies are unpredictable and unexpected because they
are circumscribed by time and history. They consist of paradoxical returns,
ironic inversions, metamorphoses of beauty into ugliness, of great ideas into
platitudes, of great human gestures into ridicule and awkwardness. This is
Kunderas world, in which individual existence defies history. Harmony and
perfection in the composition of the novel are means of resistance, through
which the author demonstrates his presence in existence, while narrating
stories of other possible existences.
For Kundera, a character is but a model of a possible existence, and it is irrelevant whether its prototype is this or that real person. Kundera is thus very
different from Skvorecky for example, who often models his characters according to figures in life. Causality is accidental in Skvoreckys stories, for
these seem to be taken from life experience; Kundera reworks and changes
experience through his style, in order to create from it a whole fictional
world.
Looking at the titles of Kunderas novels, one is struck that most of them
designate an action, an attitude, or a character feature. Witness Zert, Nesnesiteln lehkost byt (The Unbearable Lightness of Being), Pomalost (Slowness),
Identita (Identity), Ignorance (Ignorance), and Nesmrtelnost (Immortality). The
titles designate a dynamics of the content, which is defined by some instability
or variability. Yet, the relatively high rate of generalization indicates a tendency to name a model process that is not related to only one empirical case.
The essence of Kunderas works appears here. It is defined by conflicts between stability and instability; change and the desire for identity and permanence; a tension between the worlds permanent dissonance and a desire for
harmony; tension between generalization and repetitions of human destinies
and uniqueness; tension between impersonal narration and personal involve-
388
ment of the author as a human existence sharing with others history and their
public space, and at the same time longing for the intimacy of privacy.
I believe we cannot interpret faithfully Kunderas work without taking into
account his art of reflection, without considering his comments and his textual metafictional reflections. Kundera is not the type of writer who reveals by
means of writing, the desire to read his own gestures, as do other authors engaging in self-reflection. Kundera does not enter his works via metafictional
reflections in the text. Instead, reflects on them as an author who guards the
orchestration of his already completed work. His reflection relates then to his
finished and definitive works; its aim is to protect them against disintegration
and misuse. Kundera does not open and reopen his texts to a public debate;
he only guards what is definite according to his persuasion.
It is not possible to divide Kunderas work in pre-exile and exile, in French
and Czech phases. His work represents a very complex assemblage of texts,
from which we can omit, with good conscience, only Kunderas early poems,
but hardly anything else. It seems that Kunderas novelistic creation represents, as, for instance, Egon Hostovskys work, a unique gradually formed and
yet very homogeneous whole.
Kunderas move from Czechoslovakia to French, and his later switch to
write in French are highly controversial. I believe that Kunderas abandonment of Czech culture and his choice of French relate to his conception of the
novel. To create an image of absurdity in history and existence, he needed a
large scale. Czech literature was especially confining for writing the great
novel that Kundera has been striving for. Czech prose of the second half of
the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century represents, in Kunderas
view, a collection of somewhat improvised texts, rarely comparable with what
had been created at the same time elsewhere in Europe. There were only a few
exceptions: next to Jaroslav Hasek, it was Vladislav Vancura, an outstanding
stylist in Czech prose, who became a subject in Kunderas relatively early
paper LArt du Roman. In an interview following the publication of Smesn
lsky (Laughable Loves) in 1963, Kundera said: I never could force myself to
read Zola but I love his antipode: Anatole France. I have full respect for modern American prose, but I am closer to Thomas Mann and, for example, Robert Musil. Simply said: exactness of a reflection attracts me more than exactness of observation (Smesn lsky dust cover of the 1970 ed.).
This exactitude of reflection, which implies understanding causal relations
and not only empirical causalities, indicates Kunderas striving for a great
composed unit. His affinity with great stylists and a certain reserve towards
the American prose of the 1960s show that works that had a balanced and
elaborate inner composition inspired him most. His preference for the Euro-
389
pean intellectual tradition meant at that time an isolation in the Czech countries, not in rhetoric, evidently, but in deciding for this concept. Important
authors, prose writers of Kunderas generation like Skvorecky and Lustig,
were ostentatiously showing their affinity with American style; others tried to
follow specific local styles, as for instance Ludvk Vaculk, who employs in
Sekyra (The Axe) a narrator that uses Moravian local dialect as a contrast to
communist news speak of the period. Only Kundera strove for the idea of a
great elaborated unity, and his inspiration, excepting Vancura, came from outside the Czech universe. Therefore I do not consider Kunderas move to exile
illogical, and I suppose that if it hadnt been for the specific situation at home
he would have sought his large scale and style quite independent of the historic events at home in Czechoslovakia.
The same applies for Kunderas choice for French. During my stay at Columbia University in 1994 Romanist and exile George Pistorius informed me
about a debate that took place in France sometime at the beginning of the
seventies. It concerned the question whether a writer can abandon his mother
tongue and become a writer of a different language. Participants in this discussion were, among others, Jan Cep, an exile who was one of the most important prose writers of the thirties and forties, the modernist experimenter
Vera Linhartov, and Milan Kundera. The latter two were recent exiles. While
Jan Cep, who became an exile in 1948, argued that an author cannot change
his mother tongue without important losses, Linhartov and Kundera defended the opposite point of view, giving Joseph Conrad as their example.
This was not only a generational disagreement in which the older Jan Cep,
with his experience of prewar Czechoslovakia, was much closer to the
National Revival and its idea of language as an inviolable element of both
national as well as personal integrity It also involved the implementation of a
poetics. While Cep was an author with a very personal, almost lyrical concept
of literature, Linhartov and Kundera considered a literary text an object of
art, an object of a perfect aesthetic creation. The authenticity of existential involvement was not diminished by Linhartovs and Kunderas attitude. This
authenticity is not connected to a unique language; it is not bound to the
national tradition of a home country but is tied to the concept of modern discontentment to existence as an individual experience of exceptionality anywhere, an experience without standbys and certainties.
For Kundera, the change of language meant, in my opinion, only a choice
of new means, choice of a new tool to construct his opuses better and more
perfectly. Having mentioned musical imagination and rhetoric as shaping
forces of Milan Kunderas work, let us note that the conception of musicians
and of pure instrumental music have always transgressed the border of
390
national or monolingual space through its universality. Furthermore, the

image of the musician became in Czech literature an archetypal vehicle of a
Czechs voyage abroad. Witness Josef Kajetn Tyls play Svanda dudk, Antonn Sovas prose Pankrc Budecius kantor, Josef Horas poem Jan Houslista, as
well as, in an ironic tune, Marie Souckovs novel Bel Canto.
To interpret Kunderas shift from the Czech language to the French one as
a political gesture or a gesture of refusing Czech culture is nonsensical. Since I
believe Kundera that his novels are his main concern, I have no reason to
doubt that entering into French language and culture was for him nothing else
but the choice of a means to a more perfect novelistic esthetic expression.
French language represents in comparison to Czech more open space for
Kundera, which means more possibilities for him as an author, more possibilities for him to create his work as a perfect and finished whole and thus to
transfer it to the auditorium.
What conception did gradually take form in the individual novel-opuses?
The author himself designated Zert as number one. Already in this 1965 novel
we can find the fundamental elements of Kunderas poetics. Its dominating
feature is the dynamic movement of actions and gestures, the vehicles and
tools of which are the individual characters. Discourse is an initiation: a seemingly innocent utterance sets off a scale of causes and consequences hitting
the protagonists through time and history. The narrator conceives this flow of
causes and effects as a closed circle. The movement in this circle is incalculable and unpredictable. Within the narration this conception creates a set of
absurdities and paradoxes that the characters are to face. As for the form of
the novel, the whole creates to a certain measure a perfect compactness of
each composed unit. The perfection of the composition stages human existences in history as victims of coincidence, irony, and incalculability in history.
At the same time, this type of perfection indicates a dominance of intellect
the intellect of the narrator or of a character acting in the story over the way
of all sorts of corporeality, the matter moving forward through history and
time. To a certain measure, a perfect literary or artistic unity seems to offer the
possibility to save humankind from chaos and the desperate, fatal disharmony
of the world. The narrator and his work hold out thus a certain kind of hope
for the hopeless destinies of the protagonists in novels. Sometimes it is as if
the author referred to the medieval quarrel of body and soul: My soul saw a
womans body. She was indifferent to that body. She knew that the body
meant something for her only as a body (Zert 198). Corporeality appears
here, and frequently in the authors later works, as a strange variable. The fictional onlooker experiences distance from it, estrangement, and often disgust
and anxiety: I looked in Helens face, reddish and disfigured by a grimace; I
391
put my palm on that face; I put my palm on it as on an object we can turn and
roll over, crush or press, and I felt that the face accepted my palm exactly in
that way (99).
We can find similar feelings of distance in Sartre, in La Nause for example,
and in some surrealists as well. In Kundera, however, the observing consciousness is not only offset from the body, suffering from a desperate conflict with it and sensing at the same time its inseparableness from it. A selfreflective conscience can be a vehicle of the intellect or soul, of something
that surpasses dull corporeality. Not in a mystical separation from corporeality, but by being able to create perfect and harmonic units of reflection thanks
to which the soul gains dignity and beauty that contrasts with the chaos of history and time. In this chaos, bodies are hit: the utterance, the gesture, and the
action return to wound those who are their authors, or those having no idea
about these entities, erring in historical time: my voyage to my native town,
where I intended to strike the hated Zemnek ends by my holding in my hands
a hit friend (312).
Human beings as physical existences are victims of such turbulences, and
they are completely helpless against them. The only defense is an exact reflection on this process. Conscience and the intellect are not naturally above the
body, but they defy corporeality and the whirling movement to which it is exposed. The distance between the reflective consciousness and corporeality
forms, it seems, one of the most evident principles of Kunderas poetics. Representations of consciousness vs. corporeality can be found in several short
stories of Smesn lsky (Laughable Loves). In Let the old Dead Make Room
for the Young Dead, the ironic relation to corporeality is in a multiple way
present in the title. And the narrator says about the main female character:
She disliked talking about death and getting old because they had a physical
ugliness in them she abhorred (Smesn lsky 90). In Eduard a Buh (Edward
and God), the protagonist teacher makes love to his ugly superior, while in
Falesny autostop (The Hitchhiking Game), lovers engage in a game of
hitchhiking, pretending they do not know each other. At the end of the love
game, the man feels disgusted. In both cases, the protagonist experiences a
painful discrepancy between deep feelings and and inauthentic love making.
We find similar representations in Valck na rozloucenou (The Farewell Waltz),
Nesmrtelnost (Immortality), and Pomalost (Slowness). The main character of
Nesnesiteln lehkost byt (The Unbearable Lightness of Being) has a liking for bizarre women, one of which seems to him to resemble a stork. Here, as elsewhere, attention to curious aspects of a persons body makes this person to
appear as some kind of animal. The title of the books second part, Soul and
Body, calls attention to the clash between spirituality and animal bodies.
392
At first sight, one could deduce from the narrators rhetoric that we have to
deal with a typical? dualist: body and soul, lightness and weight go together
here, as in almost in all of Kunderas texts. The duality is evident also in the
contrast between the elegant architecture of modern bathrooms and the
cloaca maxima beneath (one of the meditations in Nesnesiteln lehkost byt).
However, we have to keep in mind that these rhetorical figures are for the
author but means of a play. The dual world represents the same as contrast in
music, and the narrator uses it to stress the dynamics of the whole. Lacking a
fixed value in Kundera, dualities are constantly changed or reversed according
to the authors changing ironic distance.
In all of Kunderas novels, we can find clashes between the body and consciousness a consciousness derived from corporeality and at the same time
striving for autonomy, for freedom to express, not an exact message concerning what has been observed, but one concerning the situation in which all corporeality partakes in time and history. Not the reality of one unique being is
Kunderas epistemological goal; rather, he seeks representations of situations,
in which unique beings partake in historic time. From Zert to Ignorance, readers
witness model clashes of existence with history. Kunderas historic time and
space are very concrete, and hence the Czech pre-exile experience plays as important a role as the later European one. Kunderas vision consists of these
confrontations between a reflecting consciousness and corporeality moving
in a circle. Consciousness, and speech as a manifestation of intellect, inexorably returns to the body, repeatedly rediscovering physical existence and
existence in history, both of which move in circles of unfathomable causes
and effects.
However, Kunderas vision is embodied in the narrators activity, in the need
to understand perfectly the relationship of human existence in history; it manifests his desire for a perfectly constructed work of art, which is an existential
protest against the temporal waste of life and of reflecting human consciousness. Kunderas disdain for narrow-mindedness, imperfection, and ordinariness is, above all, an existential protest against permanently decomposing
beauty, memory, and the body.
Twentieth-century prose discarded the omniscient narrator in order to
present the authentic experience of an individual, and it got caught because
individuals are ignorant of the other. Kundera kept the omniscient narrator,
but changed him to represent the author as an active, reflecting, and creating
existence, whose gesture must be permanently present in the work.
In his obstinate fight to perfect his work and its interpretation, Kundera
appears to me as a permanent seeker of an accurate thought, a seeker of
contexts, actions, and gestures. Throughout his life, human beings remain the
393
author, the object and the victim of these. Kundera thus appears as a true romantic. He remarks in his essay Nechovejte se tu jako doma, prteli (Dont Behave
here as at your Place, my Friend): I think of Stravinsky, of his great effort to
leave here his work in his own interpretation as an undeformable model (71).
His sympathy with Stravinsky and the faith in the undeformable model is, it
seems to me, good evidence of Kunderas romanticism. He declares that it is
an authentic right of every human being to resist all evidences of reality, to
fight to the very end against an omnipresent and threatening disintegration.
Exposed to the chaos of history, we must repeatedly try to recapture the lost
paradise of harmony and perfection, even if the effort is in vain.
Works Cited
Hora, Josef. Jan Houslista. Prague: Borovy, 1940.
Kozmn, Zdenek. Romn lidsk existence (The Human Existence Novel). Kundera, Zert
31518.
Kundera, Milan. AT star mrtv udelaj msto mladym mrtvym (Let the Old Dad Make
Room for the Young Dead). Smesn lsky 89106.
Kundera, Milan. Eduard a Buh (Edward and God). Smesn lsky 13763.
Kundera, Milan. Falesny autostop (The Hitchhiking Game). Smesn lsky 7388.
Kundera, Milan. Identity. London: Faber and Faber, 1998. Trans. Linda Asher from the
French Lidentit. Paris: Gallimard, 1997.
Kundera, Milan. Ignorance. London: Faber and Faber, 2002. Trans. Linda Asher from the
French Lignorance. Paris: Grand Livre du Mois, 2000.
Kundera, Milan. Nesmrtelnost (Immortality). Brno: Atlantis, 2000.
Kundera, Milan. Nechovejte se tu jako doma, prteli (Dont Behave here as at your Place, my
Friend). Brno: Atlantis, 2006.
Kundera, Milan. Nesnesiteln lehkost byt (The Unbearable Lightness of Being). Toronto:
Sixty-Eight Publishers, 1981.
Kundera, Milan. Slowness. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. Trans. Linda Asher from the
French La lenteur. Paris: Gallimard, 1995.
Kundera, Milan. Smesn lsky. 1963. Prague: Ceskoslovensky spisovatel, 1970. Trans. Suzanne Rappaport as Laughable Loves. New York: Knopf, 1974.
Kundera, Milan. The Art of the Novel. New York: Perennial, 2000. Trans. Linda Asher from
the French Lart du roman. Paris: Gallimard, 1986.
Kundera, Milan. Valck na rozloucenou (The Farewell Waltz). 1976. Brno: Atlantis, 1997.
Kundera, Milan. Zert ( Joke). 1967. Brno: Atlantis, 1991.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. La Nause (Nausea). Paris: Gallimard, 1938.
Souckov, Milada. Bel Canto. Prague: Prostor, 2000.
Sova, A. Pankrc Budecius kantor (Pankrac Budecius, the Teacher). Prague: Ceskoslovensky
spisovatel, 1954.
Tyl, Josef Kajetn. Strakonicky dudk (The Bagpiper from Strakonice). Prague: Albatros,
1979.
Vaculk, Ludvk. Sekyra (The Axe). Prague: Ceskoslovensky spisovatel, 1966.
394
Chapter IV
Autobiographical Exile Writing
Introduction
397
Introduction
By foregrounding social, historical, and personal exile experiences, our volume devotes less attention to literary form. The present short chapter tries to
redress the balance somewhat by focusing on autobiographical writings. To
be sure, we discuss these also elsewhere in our volume. The diaries of Bla
Balzs and Ervin Sink figure in the introductory chapter, Imre Kertszs Glyanapl in Susan Rubin Suleimans article, and Monica Lovinescus voluminous Jurnal in Camelia Craciuns article. Readers concerned with genre should
also look at Neil Stewarts reflections on the specificity of literature in journals, Thomas Coopers analysis of Herta Mllers poetic language, and John
Neubauers comments on Albert Wasss style to name only a few of the relevant passages.
Next to diaries, written in the proximity of the experience, readers will also
find in this chapter examples of memoirs and autobiographies, such as Aleksander Wats My Century and Herling-Grundzinskis A World Apart. We treat
additional autobiographies in other chapters, especially in the first one, where
readers will find discussions of Julius Hays Geboren 1900. Erinnerungen (1971),
which is of special interest, since Hay was twice in exile during his complicated life, first in Moscow and then, towards the end of his life, in Western Europe. Born in 1900, as his title says, he regarded his book a novel of adventure
with a companion, namely the century itself. Equally important are Arthur
Koestlers three autobiographical volumes, Arrow in the Blue (1952), to which
we refer in the introductory essay, The Invisible Writing (1954), and Stranger on the
Square (1984),. Hay and Kostler knew each other and their lives curiously
crossed several times: they joined the German Communist Party roughly at
the same time before Hitler came to power; they met again in Switzerland in
1935, and had a joint wedding in Zurich. The subsequent political and personal divorces were held separately; Koestler spectacularly broke with Communism in 1938 because of the great Stalinist trials that Hay [Hy] experienced directly and survived in Moscow. When Hy left Hungary a second
time in the 1960s, Koestler helped getting his memoirs translated into English.
Reflecting on genres, we may briefly address in this introduction two interrelated aspects: 1) how exile writing modifies the traditional constellation of
398
genres, and 2) how such writing modifies each of the practiced genres. The
latter involves fundamental questions of language use, on which we can
merely touch here.
The autobiographical writings in this chapter are to a high degree self-reflective, even when they focus on empirical observations. Confrontations
with other cultures, as well as extraordinary and existential experiences, demand this reflection, for they can be incorporated into a new conception of
the self only if they are related to earlier experiences. Whatever is noted and
described in diaries, travel narratives, memoirs, letters, essays, and other autobiographical genres must involve, explicitly or implicitly, the pre-exilic self as
well. The outcome of that confrontation varies, according to the degree to
which the pre-exilic-self retains control. Katarzyna Jerzak shows that for
Kazimierz Brandys and Andrzej Bobkowski the pre-exilic self continues to
dominate, because these autobiographical writers find it impossible to bridge
the gulf that separates the new linguistic environment from the native one of
childhood. Similarly, Sndor Mrais observations about his readings, and his
visual encounters with both art and the social world, remain enframed by his
Hungarian language and the cultural (though not political) values he adopted
in his youth. He envisaged this by writing already before his departure: The
writer who departs from home is eternally held accountable to his abandoned people, for he is writer only in the language that these people speak.
Once he crosses the national border he becomes a cripple (281). As Jerzy Jarzebski shows in the previous chapter, this was not the view of Witold Gombrowicz, who experienced exile as liberation from the straightjacket of the
Polish tradition, even if he continued to write in Polish. Ksenia Polouektova
writes about migrs and exiles who made a transition to a new linguistic
home, sometimes with pain (Eva Hoffman), sometimes with astonishing ease
(Andrei Codrescu). Though such changeovers do not mean a total amnesiac
repression of the former self of childhood or youth a childhood self that
was already tensed between Jewish and national cultural components it
leads to the acquisition of a complex, multiple personality and a multi-perspectival view of experience. Here, as in several other essays of our volume, it
becomes evident that exile has not always been a confining loss but often a
potentially liberating (though painful) opportunity to change, grow, and enrich the self. This process is best observable in autobiographical writings, and,
vice versa, autobiographical writings gain special prominence in exile for such
preoccupations with the self.
A few final words about the other genres. Exile writers continue to write
poetry, but with very few exceptions (e.g. Jir Grusa) in their native language,
and, at least until 1989, for a severely limited native audience in exile. Fiction
Introduction
399
constitutes by far the largest part of exile writing, and it is in this genre that we
encounter perhaps most frequently exiles writing in a second language. Much
of the fiction written in exile is highly autobiographical (e.g., Mrais San Gennaros Blood or Josef Skvoreckys The Engineer of Human Souls), and, in turn, exile
has significantly contributed to the development of the hybrid genre of fictionalized autobiography, of which, Gombrowiczs Trans-Atlantyk is an outstanding example. Contrary to what one may expect, theater has been exported with surprising ease into exile. This does not hold for the exiles in
Moscow (Balzs, Hy); it does apply to Eugne Ionesco (who was, of course,
half French), Sawomir Mrozek, Janusz Gowacki, the Hungarian Squat Theater, and many Romanian directors, actors, and actresses not to speak of the
post-Yugoslav theater exiles, about whom Dragan Klaic writes in the following chapter. Finally, we should mention that an equally surprising number of
East-Central European exiles and migrs became successful in writing film
scripts, a new, perhaps marginal genre that became infinitely more lucrative
than writing poetry or fiction.
Work Cited
Koestler, Arthur and Cynthia. Stranger on the Square. Ed. Harold Harris. London: Hutchinson, 1984.
Koestler, Arthur. The Invisible Writing. London: Collins, 1954.
Mrai, Sndor. Fld, fld: Emlkezsek (Land! Land!: Memoirs). Toronto: Vrsvry, 1972.
400
Life in Translation: Exile in the Autobiographical

Works of Kazimierz Brandys and Andrzej Bobkowski
Katarzyna Jerzak
I tried to explain to a curious Englishman that the Polish literary

tradition is linked to emigration just as the Russian one is linked to
katorga. But he didnt quite understand (Brandys, Miesiace
19781981 41)
Exile: a place for the displaced, a semblance of home for those without one, a
commonplace of twentieth century literature. Jzef Wittlin, who left Poland
in 1940 and lived in New York till the end of his life, coined a term for those
who were not only out of place, but who by virtue of being elsewhere were
missing a certain era: In Spanish, there exists for describing an exile the word
destierro, a man deprived of his land. I take the liberty to forge another term,
destiempo, a man deprived of his time, meaning deprived of the time that now
passes in his country. The time of exile is different (88).
The premise of this paper is that time and space of the exile are both different. Exile in general, and specifically the displacement from Eastern Europe to the West, generates a distinct chronotope. This chronotope is characterized by a doubled perception of reality: the exile functions in a new
world, but his inner compass is invariably pointed back home. Home in the
temporal sense means the past, but it also colors the perception of the present. Home carried as contraband of sorts prompts a second take, second
glance at everything, an eye forever discerning similarities and differences between here and there, then and now. Exile is a condition of being unaccommodated and dissatisfied. A satisfied exile does not exist, he has become an
immigrant.
I focus on two Polish writers of the same generation who wrote some of
the best Polish prose in Paris: Andrzej Bobkowski, born in 1913, went to Paris
in 1939, lived there through the war, and left for Guatemala in 1948. He died
there in 1961. Kazimierz Brandys, born in 1916, remained in France in the
wake of the Martial Law in 1981 and died in Paris in 2000. The books I consider are Brandyss Miesiace (Months), published underground in Warsaw and
Life in Translation (Katarzyna Jerzak)
401
then in Paris) and Bobkowskis Szkice pirkiem (Sketches with a Quill; 1957),
never to my knowledge translated into English, published in France as En
guerre et en paix only in 1991. Bobkowski was only twenty-six when he began
and thirty when he ended his journal, while Brandys wrote Miesiace in his sixties. Bobkowskis prose is ardent while that of Brandys is lambent. The former
writes with the energy and temperament of a hooligan of freedom, as he
calls himself, while the latter adopts a more elegant posture. I am therefore I
think is their motto, and yet they also feel. Theirs are not books of dry deliberations or facile reconciliations; they bristle with unreconciled oppositions and contradictions: freedom versus loyalty, patriotism versus cosmopolitanism, cultural heritage versus disinheritance. Exile contains all of them.
Schopenhauer is the name with which Brandys opens Miesiace. It is not,
however, the philosopher who interests him, but his mother Johanna, who
was a friend of Goethes and an author in her own right. Brandys begins his
own diary/memoir by evoking her memoirs, which recount her childhood
spent in the Free City of Danzig. She was born there in 1766. For Brandys it is
clear that Johanna experienced as an exile her permanent departure from
Danzig upon its annexation by Prussia. After reading her memoirs Brandys
travels to Gdansk and walks by the reconstructed townhouse where the Schopenhauer family lived and where Arthur was born. The house is reconstructed because Gdansk was completely destroyed during World War II:
I was walking along the high road of Johanna Schopenhauers childhood as if across an
empty stage where decorations still stand after the play is done and the actors gone. []
The procession of resurrected houses allowed our steps to pass by in silence. [] On
both sides the windows are shut, no eyes look down from them. Large wax dolls would
be at home here. In this street there are no human neighbors, no multilingual crowd rises
and falls here. (Miesiace 19781981 11)
The year is 1978, the passage is thus written before Brandyss defection to
the West. And yet the opening sequence of Miesiace already thematizes not
only exile as such, but specifically exile as a response to political authoritarianism. More than that, by evoking the Schopenhauers voluntary departure
from their city, Brandys puts forth a precedent for many twentieth-century
writers leaving their small homeland. The passage is an elegy not only for
the multicultural past of Gdansk, where Brandys had never made his home,
but above all for the multicultural Poland into which he was born (although de
facto he was born in 1916, before Poland was reestablished; in Alfred Jarrys
bon mots, en Pologne, cest-a-dire nullepart: In Poland, which means nowhere). Brandys saw this Poland disappear. He saw himself as a living relic of
that past, a Polish Jew, one of the few who survived and one of the even fewer
who remained in Poland after the war. Several years later in New York City,
402
marveling at the multiethnic, multilingual crowd, he will reiterate his longing

for a Poland that doesnt exist anymore; the homogeneous culture of 1978 Poland repels him.
The link that Brandys autobiographical persona establishes to Mrs. Schopenhauer is not unlike the connection that Charles Baudelaire invokes in the
opening lines of his exilic poem Le cygne to Andromache, the tragic
woman exile figure of Antiquity: Andromaque, je pense vous! (Andromache, I think of you!). You have lost your Troy, says the poet, and I have lost
my Paris. Brandys evoking Johanna Schopenhauer serves a similar purpose: it
establishes that exile is not of yesterday (St. John Perse), that as a writerly
and human condition it has a pedigree and a history. But it also complicates
the usual image of exile: Danzig/Gdansk was never simply Polish or uniformly Prussian, and Mrs. Schopenhauer, although ostensibly German,
placed herself in a dissenting minority. But there is yet another connection between Baudelaires lyrical subject, whose greatest woe is the inexorable passing of things, and Brandys persona: The sudden thought that I will never be
reconstructed like that [] that my flesh and my bones, just like Mrs. Schopenhauers body, are impossible to rebuild and that it will only be a little while
longer that I will hover in the ether of someones memory (Miesiace
19781981 12). In Brandyss book the ultimate exile is to be forgotten. Miesiace is a consciously molded counterweight not only to that commonplace
forgetting that is the passage of time, but also to the other malaise, which is
exile. This is not to say that Brandyss defection is a malediction: on the
contrary, he does not cease to praise the freedom to write. And yet, like Sndor Mrai, who quotes in exile Goethes words, In every separation there is a
grain of madness (251), Brandys lives his voluntary separation from Poland
as a disquieting condition, a disease. In the final account neither Mrs. Schopenhauer, nor Andromache stand as the most radical epitome of the exiles
fate: echoing Baudelaires eponymous swan who is ridiculous and sublime
like the exiles, Brandys will evoke a grotesque image of a white llama in the
middle of Berlin, positing that uncanny figure as the symbol of exiles muted
grief.
But what makes Brandys, or any member of the cultured Polish intelligentsia, ill at ease in Paris, Berlin, or New York? Has Eastern Europe not experienced always a powerful attraction to things foreign, and especially to the
great Western cities, whose cultural superiority was beyond question? Brandys offers a most personal answer to these charged issues. Having opened his
book with Mrs. Schopenhauers nostalgic vision of her native city, Brandys
goes on to quarrel with her son, but only in passing. Spurred by Johannas
passionate account of Gdansk he reads a book about the philosopher written
403
by the Polish intellectual historian Jan Garewicz, and then, abandoning Schopenhauer as if he had been only a pretext to a private recollection, he remembers Garewiczs older brother who, in middle school, had lent Brandys a
set of paints:
They were wonderful, foreign [zagraniczne literally, from the other side of the border]
paints in a flat metal box imitating ivory, nestled in a shiny green leather case a set of
paints with a set of incredibly well maintained brushes of various thicknesses and
lengths. Little Garewicz lent them to me very agreeably and I promised to return them to
him after the art lesson. But before the lesson began my fellow students noticed them as
they lay in front of me in an open box. Their foreign [cudzoziemska from a foreign land,
from the land of the other] elegance rendered my classmates dumb. At first everyone fell
silent, staring at Garewiczs paints, as if enchanted by the very possibility of existence of
beauty so ideal, a possibility which went beyond all their dreams. Such beauty was unknown to them and seemed proof of a distant perfect state of being whose existence they
had thus far ignored. Then all of a sudden they threw themselves on Garewiczs paints
and began destroying them. Within a minute the paints were a wreck. [] Until late that
night my mother and I searched the city for a set of paints similar to Garewiczs treasure.
In vain, nothing like that existed. The sale clerks pulled out various boxes but each time I
shook my head gloomily and at last my mother exclaimed: You must have invented
these paints! Still, I was convinced that they were somewhere, that we could find them
somehow. One of the shop owners told us to return the following day. But the next
morning plump, rosy Garewicz peeked into my classroom and politely requested the return of his property. (Miesiace 19781981 20).
The memory of this event, which reads like a parable or a fantastic happening
out of one of Bruno Schulzs tales, haunts Brandys for years, as a rather similar experience with a Polish boy Pribislav Hippe haunts Thomas Manns fictional Hans Castorp in Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain). The unreal
beauty of Garewiczs foreign set of paints, unmatched by anything one could
find in a wealthy Polish city before the war, is the utopian beauty of foreign
parts, of the West. Many years later the elderly Brandys will resent that overabundance:
Colorful pyramids of grub, bright, illuminated supermarket aisles, dozens of kinds of
cold cuts, coffee, chocolate, jam, huge, bloody edges of sirloin, pink hams surrounded by
white skin of fat, fish from the oceans and the rivers of the entire world, pineapples,
mountains of pineapples. They, their banks filled with the silence of temples, their new
car models akin to immense gems behind the reflecting displays, the gold shimmer of fall
furniture salons, piles of furs, rugs, royal galleries of shoes (Miesiace 19781981 352)
Thus the beautiful albeit unreal set of paints was only a harbinger of a reality
equally beautiful and unreal, the reality of French, German, Swiss super and
hypermarkets. It was as if Brandys had to live now in the made-up world of
Garewiczs paints, as if he had walked into a set like the metal box that imitated ivory: beautiful, shiny, fake. And unlivable.
404
No wonder that Brandys never writes in French. He speaks it well enough,

but to write in it would be as if to paint with Garewiczs paints: they are too
perfect, the brushes incredibly clean. Did Brandys have his own set of paints?
What would that be? Where does Brandys belong as a Polish-Jewish writer?
Who was Julian Tuwim with his Ojczyzna Polszczyzna, his self-appointed
homeland in the Polish language? What about Antoni Sonimski? Adolf
Rudnicki? Henryk Grynberg? When Grynbergs autobiographical narrator in
Raccoon identifies with the scorched wild animal momentarily imprisoned
in his living room, he follows the exiles imperative. The disoriented raccoon
which falls into the fireplace is utterly out of place among the furniture, just as
the Holocaust survivor who was not burnt but did not escape unscathed
either, and is now after years of continuous evacuations and escapes cowering at the end of his world and waiting, homeless in his new refuge (Grynberg 206). The question of home becomes particularly charged in the case of
assimilated or disinherited Polish Jewish writers, who may feel intensely
Polish but are received and sometimes rejected or besmeared in Poland as
Jewish and alien. Foreign. They function always as they. Brandys own Jewishness surfaces, painful, and infected like a deep-seated splinter only when he
is faced with anti-Semitism. To paraphrase Gombrowiczs dictum I dont
know who I am but I know when someone tries to deform me: I dont feel
Jewish except when someone around me is an anti-Semite.
In Sorrow and Grandeur of Exile Wittlin points out something rather
obvious that has been said before him and will be reiterated again as long as
political borders exist and exile continues to be a literary category, namely that
the job of a writer often isolates him or her even in the homeland. For Brandys, the writerly sense of separateness is reinforced by a tangible perception
of difference: however assimilated, he is still part of a nearly annihilated minority. When these factors are compounded by a physical displacement, the
sense of exile is tripled. Perhaps thats why Brandys exilic consciousness is especially sharp.
1. Life in Translation
A writer feels more keenly than others a distance from what happens in a
foreign language. In the midst of a heart attack in Paris, Brandys marvels at his
acute consciousness, which allows him to register everything: Among other
things I was aware that all along I was talking to the people around me, all
along concerned about whether I was making grammatical errors, and at
some point, panting, I asked the young emergency room doctor, whether one
405
says un malaise or une malaise (Miesiace 19821987 287). If exile is life in

translation, it follows that there is such a thing as death in translation and that
is what Brandys nearly experiences. What does it mean to concern oneself
with questions of grammatical gender in a moment when ones life is in
danger? Rather than an example of escapism, this is proof of an unmediated
and perhaps ultimately unbreachable gap that opens between a human
being for whom language is essential and his milieu. Love in translation, too,
is problematic as Eva Hoffmans memorable inner dialogue concerning her
willingness to get married testifies:
Should you marry him? the question comes in English.
Yes.
Should you marry him? the question echoes in Polish.
No. (199)
The voice that says no speaks the language, that seem[s] to come from
deeper within (ibid.). This inner division testifies to a self that is buttressed
by the native tongue and corroded by translation. To die in a foreign language,
to marry in a foreign language, to live in translation: all are equally unreal, to
wit false.
In 1964 in Chiavari (Italy), having just delivered a lecture in Polish that was
simultaneously translated into several European languages, Brandys is
cheered by a Flemish writer who exclaims Niek zie Polska! an unwittingly
crude mispronunciation of Long live Poland! Oh mercy, so shall it always
be like that with us? Brandys asks. No one will understand us, ever? (Miesiace 19821987 332). Like Sndor Mrai, who bemoans the fact that his compatriots, the Hungarians, have been looking for understanding among the
Europeans for a thousand years, Brandys perceives the Poles as insulated as it
were from the rest of Europe especially so-called Western Europe by virtue of their language. This indifferent, kindly applause and this niek zie
Polska! But the truth about us is hidden in our language, untranslatable, familiar. The language which encloses us instead of connecting, the language with
a key (a clef), history with a key, literature with a key, and we inside, locked in
(ibid.) To a Western reader his stance may seem too self-pitying, even self-indulgent. After all, there are many more Poles than Flemish people in the
world. What Brandys expresses, however, is the evident provinciality of his
mother tongue. Even though Polish is part of a large Slavic language family, it
is not and has never been, a major language.
How alive Brandyss connection to Poland, to Polishness is becomes apparent when he recounts the drama of being cut off from the Polish language
as a severing from his very being:
406
After December 13 [1981, the imposition of the Martial Law] I would wake up in the
middle of the night on my sofa bed in Queens, and there, to my right, were barbiturates,
and to my left, the window (six flights up). I felt with mathematical certainty that I was
left with one of these alternatives. [] I tried, in the dark, to figure out what could get
me out of the depression caused by being cut off from my very being. A university position? But I would have to lecture in English, whereas I can think only in Polish. All jobs
would force me to vegetate in the foreign tongue, which would separate me from my
cortex, formed with layers of Polish associations and reflexes. Utter torture. (Miesiace
19781981 23)
Ironically, this fragment is one of those that is abbreviated, simplified, or outright mutilated in the English translation titled Paris-New York 19821984
(24). Indeed the term translation is unfit here, as the text published in English
is but one third of the original Polish, a kind of Readers Digest version for the
Anglophone reader who, so the editors suppose, does not want to be troubled
by this prolegomena to Eastern European metaphysics. Brandys, like Cioran,
claims that he never recognizes his texts in translation; they seem strange and
alien to him. That is why the prospect of fame abroad does not entice him.
If a Pole is separated from the rest of the world by virtue of his mother
tongue, then a Pole abroad is necessarily marked by this language and the untranslatable reality it encodes. As Wittlin writes: Thus the imagination of the
exile is filled not only with memories of places and people left behind, memories of events, but also with memories of words heard only before his exile.
Such words haunt a writer like shadows, like phantoms (91). Brandys describes the case of his acquaintance, Zeno, who, fluent in Spanish, left Poland
for Argentina unprepared for linguistic troubles:
But on the contrary, Im telling you, the real disease is in language. [] In the first years
it drove me crazy, I swear; it was real schizophrenia! He spoke about a pressure on the
brain. At night he was woken up by foreign words, he fell asleep, and dreamt of idioms.
You cannot say szklanka, you cannot say szubrawiec. You have to translate everything; you
live in a perpetual translation. [] He proposed, married, had children. But all along
somewhere within he was haunted by a feeling of incomplete truth: All this [new life] is
well rendered, its a good translation. I have translated my life into Spanish. (Miesiace
19821987 333)
Language, then, makes for an indivisible part of the self; and the translated
self, no matter how functional, adaptable, even successful by objective standards, fails to be compelling. It is as if ones foundation were constructed with
irreplaceable native expressions: He had a theory that all the painful aspects
of life abroad: depression, nostalgia, all derives from the violence done to the
language of childhood which cannot be replaced with any other (ibid.). It is
not surprising then that the passage in which Brandys recounts Zenos brief
return to Warsaw is nearly untranslatable into English or any other language:
407
He visited Poland in 1958 or 1959 and spent his first night at the bar called Pod Kuchcikiem
[Under the Cooks Boy]. On Nowy Swiat, at that bar he landed somebody one in the jaw
[] And he was happy that he could emit his true sounds, happy like a dog who can finally bark. He rolled his eyes To say kurwa, to say jakbogakocham, to roll in the bedding of words, to breathe in their wonderful smelly odor []: Id say daj pan spokj,
Id say odczep sie pan! Id sayEdek! Id say Wadek! Words were defrosting in my
head [] Brother, do you understand? (Miesiace 19821987 333)
The fateful bars most prosaic and yet evocative name Pod Kuchcikiem uses a
diminutive that functions on its own, immediately signaling a place that is
familiar, informal, not to say homey. This name would not ring the same bell
in Buenos Aires. The bars location on Warsaws thoroughfare street called
Nowy Swiat (New World) rings with an unintended irony, as this is the locus
of the Old World. Last but not least, the string of more or less innocuous expletives emitted by Zeno indubitably identifies the place as belonging to him.
Unlike English or French, Spanish is full of diminutives and someone
schooled in Polish ought to find a consolation in their expressiveness. But
Spanish diminutives learned in midlife will always have the smell of fresh
printers ink, not of old bedding. One day, when all the cafs in the world are
called Starbuck, this sense of nostalgia will diminish as elsewhere will have
disappeared.
This is not to say that the language one misses must be colloquial and quotidian. The literary versions of the native tongue can satiate some of the nostalgic craving as well. In Paris in1940, Andrzej Bobkowski finds himself unable to digest crystalline French prose:
I cannot read in French. I cannot. Each word, each French expression gags me. I cannot
bear these rounded sentences and epithets, this dryness and this cult of words devoid of
feeling. I know it doesnt make sense, but I cannot help it. When I look at my [French]
books on the shelf, without exception good and carefully chosen, I cannot pick up a
single one. It is as if I had eaten too much of a rich, sugary, creamy pistachio tort. Physical
glut and a feeling of disgust towards words, sentences, topics. It was with a nearly barbaric greed that I devoured Pan Tadeusz and now Im tearing Sienkiewiczs Potop with my
teeth as if it were a fatty leg of mutton. I lick my chops, I smack my lips, I wipe my greasy
fingers on my pants and I gobble it up. (Szkice 149)
It is no coincidence that the metaphors used here pertain to nourishment.

One cannot survive on brioche, Bobkowski says. The dainty foreign language is a fine dessert, but for sustenance he needs the meaty, substantial
Polish. Brandys calls this condition the anxiety of refugees: I have defined
this anxiety as something akin to a pang of conscience, experienced almost
physically. The place where one lives is not quite evident and not quite material, it is like a protective shade, but the substance is elsewhere (Miesiace
19821987 221). So not only is the translated self less real, the foreign sur-
408
roundings also seem to be made of a less durable, less tangible stuff than the
world at home. The Russian film maker Andrei Tarkovsky, whose film Nostalghia is a study of both physical and metaphysical exile, denounces during
his visit to the United States in 1983 what he perceives as the fragility of
American houses: Telluride: the impression that all this is a set. They dont
build houses but decorations, like in a film studio(Tarkovsky 373). All of
America is a kind of Disneyland (decorations) (376). Shoddy, flimsy, impermanent. This impression communicates a disturbing unreality of the exiles
surroundings. Exiles perceive themselves as less real because, cut off from
home and their native language, they find that the new world seems feeble,
almost phantasmatic.
In such optics, even the reality of war is undermined. In April of 1943 Bobkowski notes in passing the funerals of the victims of Allied bombings, which
take place amid spring flowers and perfume he recognizes Rumeur by Lanvin
in the streets. At the Longchamps racing track an acquaintance of mine from
the Ministry of Work was killed by one of the bombs. An older gentleman. In
his whole life he was fond of two things: horseracing and England. And he
died at the races of an English bomb. A topic for an epigram by Swinarski. He
was torn to pieces and his remnants were recognized only because of the tie
pin: a gold riding-whip studded with small rubies (Szkice 398). Though Bobkowski did not know the man very well, one would expect some sense of pity
if not a sense of tragedy. His account offers neither, and one is led to believe
that war in Paris, the war that can smell of expensive perfume, is indeed une
drle de guerre (a phoney war). In contrast, writing about the Katyn massacre on the eastern fringes of Poland, Bobkowski imagines the individual victims shot one by one. Even though the event is geographically at a great distance, his empathy does not fail when he writes of the Polish officers falling
into the common grave, some only wounded. This is not nationalism or chauvinism at work but rather an incapacity to experience the new reality with an
intensity that is proper only to events that pull at him from home.
Death at the races. Did this Frenchman die defending France? No, he died
by accident. France is here implicitly contrasted with Poland. A year and a half
later, Bobkowski describes the Warsaw uprising as senseless Polish heroism,
but heroism none the less. His is a complex case: a man disillusioned with Poland leaves it voluntarily but nolens volens experiences all the pangs of a true
exile. Bobkowski, who repeatedly declares that life in the corked bottle of
homeland has no appeal to him (Szkice 522), has much kinship with Gombrowicz and fittingly evokes Joseph Conrad, considered to be a traitor by
many a Pole because he chose where he wanted to live and the language in
which to write.
409
Prousts narrator says somewhere that flowers he first saw later in life were
less real than the flowers he had known since childhood. Jerzy Stempowski,
another Polish intellectual in exile, writes in an essay ostensibly devoted to
travel but one that actually constitutes a meditation on all manner of displacement, from peregrinatio domestica to colonization: It appears that southern Italians call, with slight contempt, all trees not mentioned by Ovid by the collective name of vitachie (321). Life in exile is a kind of afterlife, a bloodless, pale
version of its earlier self. Or, to return to Tarkovskys metaphor, it is a life
amidst theatrical decorations, a simulacrum that looks like life though its actors know full well it is not. Brandys in Paris and New York, Bobkowski in
France and Guatemala both welcome the liberating external perspective
that exile offers and yet at the same time suffer from the experience of life in
translation.
2. Uninvited Comparisons
The exile cannot relax or take it easy. A traveler can presumably withdraw into
his hotel room, close his eyes, and think: in a week, I will be home. The exile
lives in the daily tension of perpetual comparison, unmitigated by a promise
of a foreseeable return.
When Bobkowski overhears two ticket controllers talking across the tracks
of the Parisian metro about Chateaubriand, he approaches them, impressed
by how deeply the literary culture has penetrated the French society. And then
he realizes that they are talking about the Chateaubriand steak:
Chateaubriand flies from one mouth to the other as a fat, bloody beef steak. [] And
this is how legends arise about French intelligence. In reality they are as removed from
Chateaubriand right now as from a beefsteak. Bifteck while speaking about France one
must not forget about this factor, about this most important of matters in the life of the
French of any social class. Patriotism, freedom, homeland? No bifteck. Thick, rare,
juicy and soft: a la Chateaubriand. (Szkice 279)
The comparison, even if only implied, at first elevates the French civilization
above the Polish one, only to tumble into a prosy fall: French patriotism is replaced with unthinking gourmandise. As Bobkowski sums it up elsewhere:
France is Cartesian: I eat, therefore I am (Z dziennika podrzy 43).
Brandys also compares constantly. The Western European affluence is but
a glut to him: An invasion of quantity and quality, food devouring man, the
neon signs seducing, winking. They live in civilization we live in drama
(Miesiace 19781981 352). Both writers, one in the middle of World War II, the
other forty years later, juxtapose the West reduced in their optics to a well-
410
stocked supermarket shelf to the Eastern European material scarcity. This

exilic perspective is bitter, because it is overlaid with history and economics,
with the awareness that the price of the heightened Eastern European consciousness is perhaps too high:
We will never be able to communicate I say our conversations are the dialogues of the
oversaturated with those tied up [unfree]. The construction of their time is different,
look at the streets, at how they walk. They walk, while we, in Warsaw, drag ourselves or
we rush. They stroll while we are impelled or held back by something. The only thing
that links us or, rather, touches us, is the fear that we do not pull them in our mad seizures and dont dump on their heads the lead weight, dont throw them down into our
hells. Because they stroll through life, while we crawl through history. Thats how its
supposed to be, they took care of it a long time ago. Once in Vienna, and then again in
Yalta.(Miesiace 19781981 352)
Of course, not every Pole in France begrudges the French their relative
wealth. The difference in the approach to how easy it is to make a good life
abroad distinguishes, in part, an immigrant from an exile. An immigrant
gratefully accepts the cornucopia of the supermarket, for the economic
bounty is actually a main reason for his being there. Brandys distinguishes between the immigrant who takes his fate as a matter of fact, without analyzing
it, and the exile, who, acutely conscious of the cultural displacement, does not
cease to compare, to notice the differences, to look back, to feel estranged. I
know Paris, I know the French culture, he says, but it is not mine. I know Paris,
but Paris does not know me. One can adjust to the streets, to the shops, but
not to the culture as such, because culture is history, it is not all of today. It is
then the Romantic blending of the writerly and the national identity that compounds Brandys estrangement: even when Poland did not exist as a state,
Polish writers continued to write in Polish about Poland. This is not an easy
heritage to bear, and even Conrad, who often complained that he led a
double life and Gombrowicz, who ostensibly tried to free himself of the
Polish form did not escape it altogether. To be a Polish writer is a kind of
burden:
Young scientists in shorts were carrying bags out of the supermarket and loading them
into the trunks of their cars. They were mostly physicists or mathematicians; in Bures,
Gif and Orsay there are research centers and laboratories. Watching, I envied them that
they were not writers or Polish. And most of all I envied them that they were not a combination of both because I realized a long time ago that a combination or, rather, a shackling together of Polishness and literature is something tiring, even sickening. To be a
physicist and Dutch or to be a mathematician and Swedish does not necessarily perturb
each other; it does not necessarily lead to drama. I watched the deft movements of their
hands slamming the trunks, their precise civilization. After two turns of the steering
wheel they drove away, with their children and dogs in the back seat, to their houses, labs,
graphs and numbers. How normal they were. (Miesiace 19821987 264)
411
The scene just recounted occurs regularly: Brandys is in front of the supermarket, waiting for his wife and observing intensely the goings on. The scientists are his laboratory animals, the open air the terrarium. He watches them
as if he were the true scientist and they a different species, enticingly familiar
but also quite alien, not unlike the axolotls that the narrator watches in Julio
Cortazars short story Axolotl. Of course, Brandys reveals in the end that he
is a kind of axolotl, a bizarre creature privy to a painful knowledge, while they
are enviably normal and dumb.
To live in exile is to compare. Bergson tells us that memory is a category of
perception, that we perceive reality through what we have seen, what we have
experienced before. The exile confronts a new reality at every level, engaging
in perpetual to and fro. A tourist does not need to compare the Island of Jerba
or the Taj Mahal to anything back home. The essence of tourism is exoticism:
the more unreal the new sight, the better. What momentarily gratifies the
tourist, however, disturbs the exile who is grafted, as it were, onto the unreality of his new surroundings, forced to function within it. Such life is indirect, it
is life with a detour. An event takes place, and instead of hitting one in the gut,
it only resonates. Events are echoes of other events. Because everything that
happens in exile is a reminder of something else somewhere else, or because it
is not. Either way the new reality means little on its own, its virtue is acquired
by comparison.
A comparison emerges even when there is no ground for it. On September 11, 1940, in Le Lavandou (Provence), Bobkowski and his Polish workingclass companion, Tadzio, are bicycling to Paris and have just set up their tent
on the beach. It is a beautiful evening and they are eating a simple dinner:
An indescribable delight, thoughtless and healthy. Beauty doesnt stir any memories
here, it brings no associations: neither with music, nor with poetry. It is a kind of beauty
that can be eaten just like these fried eggs with canned spinach, washed down with a glass
of red wine. One doesnt feel here the need to bang out any emotions, longings or
dreams. Here at one fell swoop one can unlearn the Slavic pining, blue-eyed, wheatfield []. Here beauty is; it is on the plate, its so graspable that Im eating eggs, spinach,
the moon, the sea, the tomato salad, beans and I lick my lips. Perhaps its precisely this
tangibility that doesnt cause any desire or need to loosen thoughts, no draught in the
soul. Skylarks? Here they shoot them and eat them roasted. (Szkice 86)
The above fragment recounts the sheer enjoyment of the French landscape
whose beauty can be consumed without having to pay a tribute to Romantic
poetry or patriotism. It is as if Bobkowski could not believe his good fortune:
such delight and with no strings attached? But the purported praise is lined
with doubt. This beauty is edible; once again the French and their country
turn out to be about eating, not thinking, or even less about feelings. The
412
French, it would seem, lack soul. Whereas the Poles cannot hear a bird without remembering a line of poetry, the French simply shoot and eat. But is
their treatment of skylarks sacrilegious or liberating? And why cant Bobkowski simply say that something is beautiful? The seemingly incomparable
beauty of Provence still stirs up, by radical contrast, the Polish beauty. Poland
is always implied and Bobkowski is not free, not even once he arrives in Guatemala, where the little airport seems to him decorated in the Zakopane
style. (Z dziennika 141) His ostensible anti-nostalgia turns out to be at closer
examination a kind of nostalgia once removed or the obverse of nostalgia.
Thats why the anti-nostalgic Bobkowski mentions longing, pining, hankering
after something lost. As the Polish saying goes, Uderz w st, a nozyce sie
odezwa. The following morning at Saint-Raphal, Bobkowski describes the
beauty of the shore seen from a long swim out into the sea: No, no I would
hit anyone who would say Yes, this here, sir, is nice, but you see its not the
same as in Koluszki Because over there, in Koluszki etc. (Szkice 87).
This is a Gombrowiczian insight, Koluszki being the epitome of a Polish
backwater town. Gombrowicz could also have written the following lines:
Im not a snob, the person from Koluszki is a snob. How Mickiewicz must
have abhorred Paris and to what extent he must have been miserable there to
have written Pan Tadeusz (ibid.). Bang on the table and the scissors will
ring. Bang and heres Pan Tadeusz, even if evoked only to prove Mickiewicz
wrong. Mickiewiczs misery churned out the Polish national exilic epic because his experience of Paris was poisoned by morbid nostalgia. Bobkowski,
unlike Mickiewicz, takes France for what it is and takes it in.
And yet, this emancipated European, or perhaps cosmopolitan, stance is
still linked to Poland this place, Bobkowski says, is unlike the Koluszki that a
misguided Pole might invoke. Intent on correcting this imaginary compatriot
he emphasizes that Provence has nothing to do with Koluszki, Koluszki
doesnt even come close. But why not leave Koluszki at home and its provincial apologists, in peace? Whence the constant need to refer back? In the next
paragraph it becomes apparent that for Bobkowski all the Cte dAzur towns
are but a series of playthings (toys like Le Lavandou): nothing is real here
because there is no suffering. Tadzio and the author stop for a glass of beer
with lemonade and sip it watching the sea and the sky. The thought of war, of
killing each other in very complicated ways seems here no, it doesnt even
seem (ibid.). This reading of a landscape without war rhymes well with the
reading of the French people as lacking feeling, especially the feeling of
shame. Mocking Descartes, Bobkowski mocks lesprit francais invincible: They
believe that they think, therefore they are. Well, thats not enough today.
Today you have feel in order to be. I sense therefore I am. If I only think, I
413
might easily not feel that they are smacking me in the face [] They do not
feel, they have lost feeling (Szkice 91). Elsewhere Bobkowski will accuse the
French of lacking both reason and heart, of spitting with pity (Szkice 94) at
the Poles.
Brandys will repeat this diagnosis forty years later, when, following the dramatic birth of Solidarnosc, he finds people remarkably indifferent about
events in Poland:
They care nothing for us. We are as indifferent to revolutionary intellectuals as to housewives and shop owners. [] At the lectures and meetings here there are people of various professions and nations; at Ravenna Haus, in doctors waiting rooms, in clubs and
cafs we rub shoulders with the inhabitants of this city. We talk, we bow, and we exchange smiles. They know that I am a guest from Poland. And in the last three months
only one person asked me about my country, about life there now and about its future.
He was a lame Czech, an migr. The one and only time. This took place at an intellectual-artistic party, in the midst of noisy chatter in the languages of five continents, among
crowded and chatty people, who were part of the present almost by vocation. And one
exiled Czech made his way through them to me, limping, to ask about Poland. (Miesiace
19781981 390)
Brandys insists on the lameness by mentioning it twice in a short paragraph.

To be an exile, as Adorno said, is to be mutilated, to be handicapped: Every
intellectual in emigration is, without exception, mutilated (33). Like Baudelaires Albatross, whose wings impede him when he is not in the air, or like the
Swan walking painfully with his webbed feet on the Parisian cobblestones, the
lame Czech, too, is ridiculous and sublime. And so is Gombrowicz when in
Argentinas New World, in the pampas where there are more cows than
books, he introduces himself as a Count. In Antiquity and all the way up to
Napoleon, exile used to be a privilege of sorts, reserved for those too high in
the ranks or too famous to be simply killed. There is little dignity in the modern exilic condition, and what there is comes from the exiles self-consciousness of his fate.
The migr who is free to return home, who returns regularly, is to all appearances no longer an exile. And yet his status is not clear, he too suffers
from displacement; more than that, he seems doubly displaced, doubly not
belonging. Such is, in Brandyss account, the fate of the Polish Jewish writer
Adolf Rudnicki:
He comes to Warsaw more or less every six months, spending the other half of the year
in Paris []. He writes once in Paris, once in Warsaw, and his books are published here
and there. [] He said that in Paris he is oppressed by foreignness: it is like a pressure on
the brain, some go mad from it. After a few months he has to leave for Warsaw. So,
really, an optimal situation I declare half a year in France, and half a year back home,
perfect! Adolf puts his hand on his chest nodding his head as if he were listening to the
414
babble of an infant. [] [T]his is a man who lives in two foreign countries, a double
foreigner from Krakowskie Przedmiescie and from Saint-Germain. (Miesiace
19781981 17879)
But even Brandys himself, entrenched in one place, lives out the duality of the
exilic chronotope. Waiting in Paris for the arrival of the Polish literary critic
Andrzej Kijowski and his wife, he meditates on the essential incompatibility
of the two worlds, his two lives:
The themes and the specifics of our years in Warsaw seem more and more like a heavy
restless dream, the kind in which you toss and turn and pull at your blanket. New York
and Paris seem like another kind of dream, of the sort occurring mostly in the second
half of the night or early morning. The odd thing is that characters appearing in the first
dream can suddenly pop up in the second, simply move in, with all their luggage. I am
wondering how it will feel to walk and talk again with the Kijowskis, and how in the
world I can recapture the first dreams quick, playfully absurd language. (Paris, New York:
19821984 178).
More is at stake here than what we call culture shock. This is an extended
drama of exile, in which one reality recedes, slips away, yet the new one never
quite materializes. Brandys in this case is the link, the bridge between the two
oneiric worlds. Neither world is quite true. The old language does not adhere to the new reality, neither can it be easily imported; and the clash of characters from the first dream appearing in the second reveals the invisible
border between the two. Now and then, however, life in exile is beyond translation, beyond comparison:
On Kurfrstendamm I saw a white llama. [] The llama sniffed at the hands of passersby. Her nostrils trembled. Gentle and humble, she was kneeling at the edge of the
sidewalk while the crowd moved in front of her. Her ears flat, she was lifting her head
and neon lights were reflected in her wide set eyes. For this was taking place in the evening, on the lively Kurfrstendamm vibrant with lights. The llama was kneeling vis--vis
the largest shoe store, one of the attractions meant to entertain the crowd. Watching her,
I remembered a certain young woman, charming and wise, who told me that, having left
the country and finding herself in a big foreign city, for the first few weeks she would go
to the zoo every day. She would sit on a bench, book in hand, and would stare at the giraffe who was the only being to whom she felt close in that city. She too was brought
here from her country (Miesiace 19781981 386)
Brandyss llama, like Grynbergs raccoon and Cortazars Mexican axolotl at

the Jardin des Plantes, is an allegory of exile. The animal out of its element
takes us all the way back to Baudelaires Swan. A writer who chooses a mute
animal as his alter ego is motivated by the power of the untranslatable. This is
not the poets coy reference to the unsayable; the white llama in the Berlin
street, the wild raccoon in Grynbergs living room, the Mexican axolotl in the
Parisian aquarium, and the white swan in Haussmanns Paris are rather alle-
415
gories of extreme displacement. The empathy of the exile goes out to them
because here all comparisons stop. Allegory, like all form, has its salutary effect: exile makes the differences sharper, more visible, palpable. The writer as
allegorist embraces exile and accepts it, albeit seeing its grotesque aspect.
True exile cannot be shed at will. It is a dynamic form of otherness, of being
other, being unlike others around you. The incomplete truth of life in exile is
filled out in the creation of the exilic self in literature. Not language as such
but literature is the home of exile.
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia. London: Verso, 1974. Original German ed. 1951.
Baudelaire, Charles. Le cygne. Oeuvres compltes (Complete Works). Paris: Gallimard, 1961.
8183.
Bobkowski, Andrzej. Szkice pirkiem (Sketches with a Quill). Warsaw: Cis, 2007. First ed.
Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1957. French Trans. Laurence Dyevre as En guerre et en paix journal 19401944 (In War and Peace: Journal 19401944). Paris: Noir sur blanc, 1991.
Bobkowski, Andrzej. Z dziennika podrzy (From a Travel Journal). Warsaw: Wiez, 2006.
Brandys, Kazimierz. Miesiace 19781981 (Months 19781981). Warsaw: Iskry, 1997. First
ed. Miesiace 19781979. Warsaw, Nowa: 1980 and Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1981. Miesiace
19801981. Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1982.
Brandys, Kazimierz. Miesiace 19821987 (Months 19821987). Warsaw: Iskry, 1998. First
ed. Miesiace 19821984. Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1984. Miesiace 19851987. Paris: Instytut
Literacki, 1987.
Brandys, Kazimierz. Paris-New York 19821984. New York: Random House, 1988.
Cortazar, Julio. Axolotl. Blow-up and Other Stories. New York: Pantheon, 1967. 39.
Grynberg, Henryk. Racoon. Szkice rodzinne (Family Sketches). Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1990.
201207.
Hoffman, Eva. Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language. New York: Penguin, 1990.
Mrai, Sndor Memoir of Hungary 19441948. Trans Albert Tezla. Budapest: Corvina/Central European UP, 1996.
Stempowski, Jerzy. Polska krytyka literacka (Polish Literary Criticism). Warsaw: Czytelnik,
1988.
Tarkowski, Andriej [Tarkovsky, Andrei]. Dzienniki ( Journals). Warsaw: Instytut Sztuki
PAN, 1998.
Tarkovsky, Andrei, dir. Nostalghia. 1983. Videocassette. Fox Lorber, 1998.
Wittlin, Jzef. Sorrow and Grandeur of Exile. Four Decades of Polish Essays. Ed. Jan Kott.
Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1990. 8196.
416
From Diary to Novel: Sndor Mrais

San Gennaro vre and tlet Canudosban
John Neubauer
Mrais autobiographical writings hide as much as they disclose. His most distinguished confessional work, Egy polgr vallomsai (Confessions of a Citoyen), is a beautiful fictionalized autobiography of his twenties, but it repeatedly stops where confessions would begin, and the same may be said of
Fld, fld: Emlkezsek (Land, Land: Memoirs), which covers the years 194448
and is often regarded as a sequence of the Confessions, and the diaries that
Mrai started to write during the war years. The memoirs end with Mrais
1948 departure from Hungary, anticipating this event with lengthy reflections
on exile, whereas the event remains all but invisible in the diaries. It is only by
reading on that we notice a break in perspective: in the Hungarian sections of
the diaries the world and its history intrudes upon the writer, whereas in the
exile sections the writer goes, reluctantly, on trips of physical, intellectual, and
artistic explorations. Since these explorations take different forms in diaries
and novels, I wish to ask on the next few pages, what the link is between the
first two diaries that Mrai published in exile (covering the years 194557 and
195867) and the first two novels he wrote abroad, San Gennaro vre (Saint
Gennaros Blood) and tlet Canudosban ( Judgment in Canudos).
Mrais diaries, just like his fictional autobiography, are not vehicles of selfrevelation, even if we learn much about his opinions: what Mrai writes about
himself often serves as a mask, not via misstatements but by omission. We
cannot reconstruct from the diaries a chronology of Mrais life, for the individual entries, grouped according to years, hardly ever carry precise dates, and
this is actually not necessary for they seldom pertain to momentous events in
Mrais life or in the affairs of the world. What we found concerning his surely
traumatic departure from Hungary in 1948, repeats itself in the critical year
1956, which momentarily enflamed his hope for a return home so much that
he flew to Europe (all too late!). The diary contains only three relevant remarks: the first reacts to the reform movement in the spring, summer, and
early fall by skeptically noting that critiques of the communist methods are
questionable, for the methods are automatically produced by the theory and
From Diary to Novel (John Neubauer)
417
the practice (207). The other two are laconic, but dated remarks: on October 23, the day of the uprising, he notes Gods mills are grinding fast,
whereas three days after the final Soviet aggression, on November 7, he
merely notes being in an airplane.
While the Napl neither follows Mrais quotidian life nor records the momentous events in his life, it does contain plenty of reflections on his predicament. To the question why he shuns all visitors, he responds: I can create
what is human only if I keep away from people. [This is] not haughtiness, but
ultimate, final humility (66). And in 1951: Hungarian society [I bicker with
it] but, nevertheless, I absolutely belong to them (sic) (110).
Self-revealing are also Mrais countless commentaries on his readings and
visual art experiences, for they show a very sensitive and articulate critic with a
dislike for modern and avant-guard expressions. His sensitivity allows him to
recognize greatness, but his conservatism repeatedly rejects even those whose
talent he recognizes: Picasso and Braque: great but not true art he notes in
1948 (66); a few years later he remarks about Dada art that it is now as it was
thirty years ago, namely just neurosis or fraud (151). Joyce Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man he finds in 1952 masterfully constructed, and presented in a
disciplined, artful way, but Finnegans Wake is a demented screaming [elmebajos sikoltozs] (135). More differentiated, though equally critical, are Mrais
comments from 1953 on Audens and Eliots poetry: This contemporary
Anglo-Saxon poetry is as alien to me as if I read a medical study; I understand this poetry, just as I do contemporary music, from which, for me, melody and feeling are always absent but I do not hear it (144). In Kafkas Az
risi rge (The Giant Suslik) meaning the story that Max Brod titled Der
Riesenmaulwurf but now is called Der Dorschullehrer Mrai could not
find the true or the genuine (igazi) (146). Although the remark agrees
with Kafkas own self-depreciating criticism, it is striking that Mrai, who
was so thoroughly alienated from his world (from the Western one almost as
much as from the Eastern one), should fail to recognize a kindred soul in
Kafka.
Alienation is evident also in Mrais concrete and often highly evocative
short descriptions of contemporary life in Europe and the US. After leaving
Hungary, he briefly stayed in Switzerland, and then settled in the Posillipo section of Naples, which he found in the postwar years dilapidated, poor, and a
curious blend of Catholicism and Communism. As an entry from 1948 shows,
he intuitively loved, nevertheless, its broken people: the people are sad;
stench; what the people teach: not survival, not even appropriation, but
simply to live. This is the true task (55 f).
418
San Gennaro vre (Saint Gennaros Blood)

These and other diary entries found their way into the first novel that Mrai
completed in exile, San Gennaro vre, which first appeared in a German translation in 1957. The Hungarian original came out only in 1965, in Mrais selfedition in New York. The locale takes up roughly half of the text with humorous and warm characterizations of Posillipos simple Italian people and their
post-war community. The first half of the text may be called a fictionalized
travel narrative growing out of Mrais daily diary observations. The second
half of the book turns, however, from description to mediated self-analysis,
by means of accounts that the novels fictional characters give of an exile
writer/scholar from an unnamed East-European country. The writer himself
never speaks directly. The first half only contains town gossip about a secluded foreigner; the second half following his accidental or deliberate fall
from a promontory to his death zooms in on him by means of searching
post-mortem reports by his female partner, a padre, and a police agent
charged with writing a report on his death. In spite of all efforts, the writer
and his intentions remain mysterious. He seems to have wanted to become a
latter-day secular redeemer (hence the link to the books title, which refers to a
Naples miracle reenacted each year with Saint Gennaros blood), but what
exactly and how he wanted to redeem remains obscure. Clear, however, are
the critical analyses he seems to have offered to his dialogue partners remarks that are Mrais own, for they makes unmistakable references to Hungarian culture. One passage, for instance, rather unfairly and viciously attacks
Gyrgy Lukcs, as a bankers son, who joins the communists as a philosopher, for he never had an original thought of wisdom, but gets a chair from
the communists, from which he declares that he, the philosopher, is actually
superfluous in society, for in a communist society self-consciousness makes
all philosophy superfluous This type of spiritual cripple lustily castrates
himself so that he can get a role in the seraglio, where he is allowed to sing in
the chorus of ideologues in a falsetto voice (146). A witty revenge for Lukcss attacks on Mrai back in Hungary, but one may ask whether it is fictions
task to settle accounts this way.
tlet Canudosban ( Judgment in Canudos)

In an introductory note to the second edition of this novel (1981), Mrai reflects on a reaction he received from a reader, who understood the central
event of the story as a desperate cry for a cleansing, at a moment of (Western)
419
civilizations moral failure. People want to flee from the swamp of nihilistic
mass hysteria (i). Mrai seems to have agreed silently with this diagnosis, for
he recounted in the introduction that since writing and publishing the book
(1970) chaos, terrorism, mass hysteria, religious sectarianism, and other rejections of (Western) society have intensified to the point that hope for a sane
world is all but distinguished.
Does the novel really portray how people want to escape from a swamp of
nihilistic mass hysteria? Mrai found the theme in a Brazilian classic, Euclides da Cunhas Os Sertoes (1902), which gives an account of a fourteen-year
war that the republican army had to conduct in the backlands around Canudos against the sertanejos, led by their messianic leader Antonio Conselheiro.
In a short postscript, Mrai admits that he could finish this voluminous and
erudite book only at the third try, for it was full of obsolete information. He
then started to write what was left out of de Cunhas book, but he got stuck,
just as in his reading, until news of the 1968 unrests started to reach him. He
saw the connection and finished the short book, which presents, by way of a
scribes later recollection, a dramatic imaginary encounter between the Brazilian Minister of Defense and three freshly captured human wrecks of Canudos, one of whom turns out to be a woman. When she is allowed a wish, she
desperately cries out, I want to bathe (98) this is the cry that occasioned
the response of Mrais reader. The commander unexpectedly grants the
womans wish; she takes her bath in the middle of the spacious barn while the
rough soldiers discretely turn away, and she emerges as a transformed being,
as a genuine and attractive woman.
In the final moments of an inhuman war, a miraculous lull allows now a
confrontation between two irreconcilable worldviews. The woman turns out
to be the wife of an migr physician from an unnamed foreign country.
When the husbands unannounced departure suddenly interrupts their long
and successful marriage, the abandoned wife puts all the indices together and
concludes that he must have gone to Canudos. By the time she reaches the rebels her husband is already dead, but she becomes herself a believer. While the
army claims that the head they display in a jar of rum belongs to the Councillor, she claims to bring a message from him: he shall leave the coming
night and build hundreds of new Canudoses in Brazil (iii; 157).
The Minister of Defense is not a professional soldier but a highly educated
civilian, a bureaucrat that believes that a democratic, liberal, and scientific
order could emerge after the deposition of the king. He can understand the
rebellion only as a conspiracy instigated by some anarchist who read the
wrong books. The woman denies knowing anything about anarchists, philosophers, and other seducers of the mind, and claims she has found in Canu-
420
dos elements of a utopian society. While he wants to know about the reasons
that motivated the rebellious acts, and about ways in which she was brainwashed, she insists that she had encountered a spontaneous community of
likeminded individuals.
The dialogue in the shadow of the final assault on the rebels is inevitably inconclusive: the Minister exits and leaves the three captives to their fate. Similarly inconclusive is Mrais novel, born in the shadow of exile. We know from
his diaries, as well as from his preface and postscript to the novel, that he abhorred anarchy and violence against the Western civil order. This was, surely,
the ideological impulse for writing the novel. Yet within the fictional context,
the Canudos judgment remains suspended. The war has turned the soldiers
into beasts, but the civil order is not a ruthless dictatorship, while the insane
rebellion manifests an irrational capacity in human beings to believe. The rebellion holds up a dangerous human capacity that also represents a ray of
hope amidst a scientific and technological society of bureaucrats. It is hardly
accidental that the spokesperson of the rebels is a woman who cannot be accused of barbarism. The foolhardy rebellion corresponds to the writers suicide
in San Gennaro vre, but the cards are stacked differently here. As Mihly Szegedy-Maszk rightly remarks, tlet Canudosban is one of Mrais best novels,
because here he manages to go beyond his inclination to monologize (96) as
it still happened in the previous novel. The balanced dialogue of the new
novel can be read in different ways, but it does not constitute a message that
would unequivocally condemn anarchist acts, even if its author definitely did
so. The novel suggests that irrational acts cannot be rationally eradicated from
history. For Mrai the citoyen, this was a horrifying perspective, yet he gave
in this novel space for those irrational rebels. And if we reread his diaries in
terms of the novels disposition, we may discover that he himself also saw in
certain irrational acts not only a threat to civil society but perhaps also a ray of
hope. San Gennaros blood, the writers suicide in that novel, and the rebellion
in Canudos all represent versions of such irrational acts, but only the second
novel offers for them a discursive defense.
If San Gennaro vre grows out of diary observations of the world around
Naples, the impulse for tlet Canudosban came from a reading experience.
Mrai may not have liked da Cunhas book, but he must have felt some sympathy with its author, who appears briefly in Mrais novel as an independent
journalist who sharply interrogates the military leader and then departs
abruptly. Da Cunha becomes this way Mrais alter ego.
421
Works Cited
Cunha, Euclides da. Os sertoes (campanha de Canudos). 1902. Trans. Samuel Putnam Rebellion
in the Backlands. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1957.
Mrai, Sndor. Fld, fld: Emlkezsek (Land! Land!: Memoirs). Toronto: Vrsvry, 1972.
Trans Albert Tezla as Memoir of Hungary, 19441948. Budapest: Corvina & CEU; Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996.
Mrai, Sndor. tlet Canudosban ( Judgment in Canudos). 1970. Munich: jvri Griff ,
1981.
Mrai, Sndor. Napl (19451957) (Diary: 19451957). Washington, DC: Occidental P,
1958. 2nd ed. 1968.
Mrai, Sndor. Napl 19581967 (Diary 19581967). Rome: author, 1968. Munich: jvri
Griff , 1977.
Mrai, Sndor. Napl 19681975. Toronto: Vrsvry, 1976.
Mrai, Sndor. San Gennaro vre (San Gennaros Blood). New York: author, 1965. Munich:
jvry Griff, 1977. First ed. in German Das Wunder des San Gennaro. Trans. Tibor and
Mona von Podmaniczky.: Baden-Baden: Holle, 1957.
Szegedy-Maszk, Mihly. Mrai Sndor. Budapest: Akadmiai, 1991.
422
Exile Diaries: Sndor Mrai, Gustaw

Herling-Grudzinski, and Others
Wodzimierz Bolecki
In 1998 I conducted interviews with the Polish writer Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski (Bolecki Rozmowy), who had been living in Neaples since 1955. During
one of our conversations Herling-Grudzinski remarked that he was fascinated with the Italian translation of Sndor Mrais novel A gyertyk csonkig
gnek (The Candels Burn to their Stump), which had just been published in
Italian and immediately became a bestseller. From the Italian press, HerlingGrudzinski learned about Mrais biography and other works, among which
he found the diary the most interesting. By that time, Herling-Grudzinski had
published seven volumes of his own Diary. Herling-Grudzinski deeply regretted that he had not known Mrais works earlier and not had met him in
person when they lived so close to each other in Italy for many years. Naples
and Salerno, where Mrai lived, are merely seventy kms. apart and HerlingGrudzinski used to be a frequent visitor in Salerno and its surroundings.
In Mrais novel, which came out in Poland several months after our conversation, Herling-Grudzinski found both the topic and the poetics fascinating. Mrai tells a story about a complex combination of love, passion and envy
which occurs between two men and a woman. The same theme pops up continuously in many of Herling-Grudzinskis works.The narration in Mrais
novel, lean, somewhat traditional, yet very intensive and free of allusions,
must have been very appealing to Herling-Grudzinski.
However, it was only the reading of the three-volume Polish edition of
Mrais Diary (which covered the years 194389) that made clear to me that
the parallel with Mrai was not only Herling-Grudzinskis last great literary
fascination, but also a crucial issue in twentieth-century East-Central European literature. Mrais Diary is like a beam of light bringing out of the darkness many still unnoticed problems and similarities between Polish writers
and him.
Let us start then by tracing this common territory. The lives of both authors were cut into two similar halves: before World War II (in Hungary and in
Poland) and after 1945 in exile. Both Mrai and Herling-Grudzinski became
Exile Diaries (Wodzimierz Bolecki)
423
closely acquainted with Nazism and Communism, the two totalitarian systems of the twentieth century; both witnessed two occupations: the German
and the Soviet one, of which the second was not known in the West; both
watched the political paradox of World War II in Eastern Europe: the barbaric
crimes of the Nazis caused the Bolsheviks (allies of the Nazis in the years
193941), to be awaited in 1945 by some Eastern European societies as liberators; both witnessed the depravation of societies and individuals under the
influence of both of these ideologies and political systems; both spent most of
their lives in exile, about which they made up their minds approximately at the
same time, right after the communists took over the power in Central Europe.
Mrais and Herling-Grudzinskis destinies and interests coincided in several ways, though neither was aware of that. Both lived for a while in Italy as
well as in Germany, which they describe with great acuity, both contributed to
Radio Free Europe and were among the most prominent people in their respective exile communities (though Mrai, for one, consistently kept away
from exile groups). Both were fascinated with art and literature, wrote about
the same writers and even the same texts, often in a very similar way.
Both Mrai and Herling-Grudzinski closely watched the stances of the
Western European politicians and intellectuals resigned to or fascinated by
Communism and accepting the totalitarian regime in Eastern Europe.
Wherever they resided and whatever they did, they lived the same hopes and
suffered the same kinds of bitterness. As an example for that I can refer to the
1956 Hungarian revolution, which received no support from the Western
countries an issue they both touch upon in their Diaries. For decades, Mrai
and Herling-Grudzinski were unknown writers in their countries, banned by
communist censorship, and both reconnected to their readers in Hungary and
Poland only after the fall of Communism. The list of such similarities is so
long that my lecture could be just an index to a book titled Mrai and Herling-Grudzinski. Such a book may one day be written; in this article I shall
focus only on a few introductory issues.
At the beginning of this comparison, we should note that Herling-Grudzinski was not Mrais peer. Born in 1919, Herling-Grudzinski was two decades younger than Mrai, but the latter had peers among the important Polish
exiled writers, including Aleksander Wat (born in 1900), Jzef Mackiewicz
(born in 1901), and Witold Gombrowicz (born in 1904). Like Mrai, Wat
committed suicide (in Paris in 1966). Mackiewicz died of cancer a few years
before Mrai (in Munich in 1985), and Gombrowicz died of asthma in Vence,
France in 1969. Like Mrai, they all died in exile, and the latter two were forbidden in their home country. Herling-Grudzinski died of a stroke in 2000 in
Naples.
424
What these writers shared may be characterized with the title of Aleksander
Wats memoirs, My Century (1977). The other diaries could carry similar titles,
for they cover most of the centurys second half: Mrai wrote his Diary between 1943 and 1989; Herling-Grudzinskis Diary covers the period from
1971 to 2000 (he started it already in 1942 but did not publish the notes covering the years 194270); that of Gombrowiczs covers the years 195366. The
similarity lies not only in the use of diary as a literary genre, but also in the discourse characteristic for all these writers, which is based on memoirs of and
reflections on the age, with the writer and his century as protagonists. A century of abrupt cultural and social changes, a century of the worst crimes and
ideological madness, a century in which masses became the subject and the individual was degraded. In one of the first records in Mrais Diary in 1943 the
fear of gigantomania, of surpassing human measures appears (1: 10).
The question what is the essence of my century functions as a fundamental leitmotif in Mrais, Gombrowiczs and Herling-Grudzinskis diaries,
as well as in Wats My Century or Mackiewiczs various autobiographical recollections. All these writers, Mrai, the oldest among them, were part of a common intellectual formation which could be called Eastern European Modernism. Despite similarities, this Modernism differed significantly from the
Western European literary Modernism in one matter: in Eastern Europe, historical heritage proved to be the driving force behind the works of the writers.
The historical heritage influenced not only the topics but also the poetics of
their works; above all it determined the particularity of their diaries.
I am interested in what we say about the diaries of the Polish writers from
the perspective of Mrais, and, at the same time, what we can note in Mrais
diary from the perspective of the Polish writers.
Eight Issues of Comparison

1.
Not all of Mrais Diary is fully published as yet. It is even difficult to say how
many volumes the diary will consist of. The Polish version comprises three
volumes, the Hungarian volumes are being complemented with titles what
was left out of the Diaries, and gradually republished in annotated complete editions from the huge reservoir in the Mrai archives. In contrast, the
Diaries of Herling-Grudzinski and Gombrowicz have already been entirely
published. The latter writers gave themselves their final literary shape and
published them. Possible supplements found in their archives will not change
these diaries.
425
Why did Mrai write a diary? Why did he publish it during his lifetime?
These same questions come up when we consider the diaries of HerlingGrudzinski and Gombrowicz. Why did the exiled East-Central European
writers publish their diaries during their lifetimes, while the ones who stayed
in their homeland did not? One answer to this question is that the diary gave
the exiled writers the opportunity of a non-fictional and totally unbound firstperson expression. The diary was for all of these writers an experience of independence (Mrai 44). In his diary, the writer presents himself to the readers
not as the author of a literary construction, behind which he himself is
hidden, but as a person, as a specific, living individual. In the literary sense, the
writer who publishes a diary rejects the convention of objective literature
whose ideal since the times of Flaubert has been the so-called authors
disappearance.
In Anglo-Saxon reflections on the modern prose, started by the essays of
William James and then theoretically developed mainly in Percy Lubbocks
The Craft of Fiction (1921) and Wayne Booths The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), the
main characteristic of the modernistic novel was the disappearance of the omniscient narrator. In this conception the dismantling of the nineteenth-century realistic novel was carried out by turning the figure of the narrator into an
instance invisible to the reader. This conception well justified in the English
language novel is not suitable to describe the development of the modernistic prose in Polish literature, where the so called authors narration (Irzykowski, Witkacy, Gombrowicz, Schulz, and others) was characteristic.
In his Diary, Mrai speaks in his own name differently from what he does,
for instance, in the novel A gyertyk csonkig gnek (The Candles burn to their
Stubs), where the narrator is anonymous. Herling-Grudzinski and Gombrowicz avoid using anonymous narrators in their literary works; they are always
written by an internal (first person) narrator, who has many characteristics in
common with the author for example parts of the biography and even the
last name. Whatever the differences between the poetics of Mrai, HerlingGrudzinski, and Gombrowicz, their notion of the diary allowed them to argue
in their own name with the world, their nation, literature, art, politics and all
twentieth-century culture. For the writers living in exile, the diary was an exceptional genre of literary expression, in which the truth about reality did not
have to be replaced with literary fiction. However, this was a privilege of only
writers in exile, for due to censorship the writers living in communist countries could not publish any truth about anything. This is why the diary (just
like the essay) became the most characteristic and, at the same time, the most
original genre of exile literature.
426
2.
The diaries of Mrai and Herling-Grudzinski differ in formal terms. HerlingGrudzinskis always specifies the date and place of writing the entry. As for
Mrai, a large part of his Diary is a collection of reflections from the whole
year; one does not know when and where they were written. Herling-Grudzinskis Diary resembles an intellectual chronicle held from day to day. He
wrote his diary in one city, Naples, and in one country, Italy. Gombrowicz
wrote his Diary in Argentina (195363), and during the last three years in Germany and in France. Mrais Diary travels along with the author across the
world, and often becomes a travel journal. Of course, Herling-Grudzinski
and Gombrowicz travel as well, however these are trips rather than long journeys. This also has consequences for the construction of the themes in the
diary. Mrais Diary could be compared to a changing, rotating stage of the
world, a theatrum mundi. He purposefully chooses the role to observe the
weirdness and madness of the twentieth century on different continents.
The diarist Mrai is aware that he is partaking in historic events that defy
up-to-date knowledge about society and the individual. This is why his Diary
focuses on reality. His Diary is saturated with condensed notes of a sociologist, historian, ethnographer, and explorer of civilization. Mrai is moved by
everything he sees: he always asks himself where people will be led by the processes and changes of twentieth-century civilization. Changes that nations,
societies, groups, and individuals undergo in the twentieth century, are an important subject his Diary. As an observer, Mrai often wonders and questions:
unanswered questions prevail in the modality of his Diary.
What the diaries of Mrai and Herling-Grudzinski have in common is a
similar description of reality, reflection on phenomena and events, behind
which the diarist hides his privacy. Mrais Diary is usually a collection of autonomous reflections, sometimes only two, three sentences. Herling-Grudzinskis diary is daily chronicle, an intended portrait of his time seen from Italy
and France. As for Gombrowiczs Diary, it is a collection of micro-essays and
polemics, in which the authors I is the center and dominates over everything. Briefly speaking: Gombrowiczs Diary is from the very beginning the
authors manifesto. The subject on which Gombrowicz lectures at many
different occasions is the individual within cultural roles and institutions. The
subject of Herling-Grudzinskis Diary is Europe after Yalta, seen through the
eyes of a former prisoner of a Soviet concentration camp. The perspective of
Mrais diary is broader because it also refers to America.
Herling-Grudzinskis and Gombrowicz Diaries consist of many commentaries and interpretations of their own works, as well as of literary works by
others. Mrai avoided commenting his own work. He wrote much about other
427
peoples works and about literature in general, but he did not turn himself as
writer into a hero of his Diary. In this, he utterly differed from Gombrowicz,
who purposefully created a diary of a writer of an artist. Herling-Grudzinskis Diary is in between these two variants. Just like Mrai, he mainly observes
the world in his Diary, and yet, at the end of his life he made himself and his
writing a hero of the Diary.
All of these diaries, regardless of their differences, are similar insofar as
their authors believe that the diary is a literary piece. Herling-Grudzinski and
Gombrowicz devote much space to this question. Mrai, contrary to them,
does not write about this issue at all. However, in the very construction of
Mrais diaries, one can find an identical artistic conception. His Diary is not a
collection of notes, but a literary work whose poetics consists of a condensation and generalization of observation. Observing a concrete individual
event (a conversation, a reading, or an observation of the world) the narrator
universalizes the singular fact and turns it into an entity. The records in
Mrais Diary become short parables, metaphoric presentations of what happened to societies and individuals in the twentieth century. Mrai is a master
of abbreviation in the Diary: he switches from narration to a brilliant comparison, aphorism, or a literary climax.
3.
Although Mrai lived in America for many years, the main subject of his
diary if one may speak of a subject in a diary at all is the history of EastCentral Europe: its revolutions, wars, terrors, atrocities, and suffering;, its restrictions on the freedom of thought, its contempt for the individual, and its
trampling on elementary values. Mrai writes about himself as a writer from
the turn of the century: I was born at the turn of two epochs. Although his
key experience just like that of Herling-Grudzinski was World War II and
its consequences, the two writers take totally different perspectives.
Aged thirty-nine, Mrai was already a mature person at the beginning of the
war. In 1939, Herling-Grudzinski was only twenty. Mrai describes in his Diary
Europe after 1939 from the perspective of a disintegrating historical unity
the disintegration of its Latin culture and tradition. These were to quote the
title of his great book memoirs of a citoyen who saw the destruction of liberal Europe by totalitarianism and nationalism. Herling-Grudzinskis Europe
is totally different, simply because he was not a citoyen or a patrician in
Manns sense of the term. Yet, there was a different, more important reason:
young Herling-Grudzinskis traumatic experience was the Soviet camp in
which he had spent two years. He called it a world apart, meaning a world of
reversed values, a prison civilization. Mrai was terrified by the degeneration
428
of liberal Europe, which he remembered from before 1939. Herling-Grudzinski fled from the Soviet hell simply to Europe. Whatever it was: compared
to the Archipelago Gulag, Europe was a normal. Mrai also experienced a
world apart, the ghetto in Budapest, which he described in his Diary. From
these two different personal experiences of the world apart Mrai and Herling-Grudzinski drew identical philosophical and ethical conclusions. For
both authors, the question what is the nature of man? became a major problem. Who is responsible for and who the victim of crime in the twentieth century? The conclusions of both writers were similar. No crime may become a
norm, because man despite some horrible experiences is a moral being. Although Mrais stance could be described as religious skepticism, he was sensitive to the metaphysical dimension of reality and of mans nature. In his notion of human nature, God and the gift of faith were paths to understand the
mystery of man. According to Mrai, man learns about himself when he is
face to face with God. The key to his humanness is therefore his conscience,
which can be neither reduced nor determined by anything. Herling-Grudzinskis conception was exactly the same. As for Gombrowicz, he thought differently: he interpreted conscience not in moral or metaphysical categories but in
interactive, social terms, as the result of inter-human relations. This conception was unacceptable for Herling-Grudzinski, and Mrai would probably not
have been its partisan either. Mrai and Herling-Grudzinski experienced
World War II in Europe; Gombrowicz was then in Argentina.
Mrais and Herling-Grudzinskis conception should also be viewed from a
different perspective. Mrais peer was Aleksander Wat, who wrote about
himself that he had been born at the moment when Nietzsche died. Wat
started in the same year as Mrai (191819), and also as a poet. However,
Mrai saw the fundament of European culture in its bourgeois character, Wat,
who was a futurist, debuted under the banner of the Nietzschean war against
all of culture and its axiological foundation. For twenty years, Wat was an advocate of the Bolshevik revolution. He changed his approach twenty years
later, during the war which he spent mostly in Soviet prisons. After his return
to Poland in 1945 he became one of the most profound and most religious
poets of Mediterranean culture, and after he emigrated in the mid-1950s, as an
uncompromising anti-communist. His Oxford lecture, The Semantics of the Stalinist Language, preceded Sovietological studies by several decades. Wats My
Century is a result of this experience; it is a story about an anti-human utopia of
creating a new civilization on the ruins of European culture and about the
price paid by humanity for this common Bolshevik-Nazi madness. If Mrai
had titled his diary My Century, his diagnosis would be the same, only the word
we would mean something else.
429
Mrai and Herling-Grudzinski watched Bolshevism and Nazism give birth

to a culture of lie. Both of them, as well as Wat and Mackiewicz, devoted much
space in their diaries to the unofficial history of Communism. They all saw
treachery, offense, political and moral crime, in the communist methods of
taking over and holding power in Poland and Hungary. Their common reply
was the decision to go into exile, because as Mrai wrote none of them
wanted to be an accomplice in crime. In this sense, their diaries were individual and intellectual attempts to destroy what they could not accept, namely
the popularity of the pro-communist discourse in the western media.
4.
Mrai repeatedly asked what the social sense of twentieth-century events was.
Wherever he resides, his diary is a sort of a mobile study of culture. The question concerns the commercial and consumptive aspects of modern civilization. Mrai interprets this question in an extremely original way. Commercialization itself is not a danger. It becomes one when the writer is requested
to adjust to the rules imposed upon him. Thus, a writer is, in Mrais view, an
unadapted man, and consequently free and independent. This idea can also be
found in the diaries of Herling-Grudzinski and Gombrowicz. However, Herling-Grudzinski and Gombrowicz do not become critics of commercialization, for they limit themselves to the defense of individual liberty against totalitarianism and the collectivization of thought. Mrai knew the problems of
modern civilization undoubtedly better than Herling-Grudzinski and Gombrowicz, and he was more sensitive to this kind of discourse than they were.
He praised the American Revolution as a pragmatic one, in which commercialization and consumption turned out to be the result of satisfying human
needs. This result, Mrai says, tends to be unpleasant in its symptoms; it is,
nevertheless, accompanied by enormous progress in the twentieth century. At
the same time, praising the American pragmatic revolution means in Mrais
Diary rejecting the myths of such European revolutions as the French and
Bolshevik one, whose realization required guillotine, terror, concentration
camps, and the Archipelago Gulag.
5.
One of the many common features of Mrais and Herling-Grudzinskis diary
writing is landscape description. It plays a crucial role for both writers: they
are sensual, they take into account colors and shapes, and they form a neverending admiration for the beauty of nature. Descriptions of nature in Herling-Grudzinskis diary are decidedly subjective and always very intimate. The
landscape is moving and changes according to the moves of the observer in
430
space. Mrais conception of description is totally different. What matters in

his diary is not what the landscape is to him but what the meaning is of what
he sees and observes. The landscape in Mrais descriptions is then objective,
independent of the observer. He tries to inform neutrally about what he sees.
Things are different in Herling-Grudzinskis Diary, in which the Naples area is
described as his other homeland, using for this description symbolic reminiscences of the lost Polish landscape. Mrais description of landscape is first of
all a means to reflect on the social world rather than on nature. My everyday
task is to see history in the landscape (279), he writes, but he actually means
the present understood as history, which produces itself in our eyes without
having a name as yet. Mrai and Herling-Grudzinski renewed the literary and
reflective function of description. What Gombrowicz did was utterly different: he deprived description of every bit of cognitive function.
6.
One theme in Mrais and Herling-Grudzinskis diaries is common for both
writers in a very special way: the descriptions of southern Italy, its customs,
the mentality of its people, its cultural remains, its landscapes, cities, and
works of art. Next to each other, these descriptions give us the impression
that Herling-Grudzinski and Mrai followed each others tracks, as if they
complemented each others observations, lived through the same fascinations, and paid attention to the same facts. We would need a large study to
show this.
7.
The last theme of Mrais Diary is old age, the description of the dying body
and of consciousness rebelling against this process, his feelings and his whole
spirituality. This is also Herling-Grudzinskis big theme, though he develops it
in his last stories rather than in his Diary.
8.
Mrai, just like Herling-Grudzinski and Gombrowicz, considered himself a
writer by vocation. Reading was for him a starting point for taking up a dialogue with other writers, a dialogue upon which he would build their condensed mini-portraits. Herling-Grudzinski acted in a like manner, treating his
Diary also as a place for practicing literary criticism. Gombrowiczs case is different: everything he writes in his Diary about other authors is only an excuse
to formulate his own conception of literature. What is significant, however, is
that Mrai, Herling-Grudzinski, and Gombrowicz directed their blade of his
criticism against literature. Each of them required that literature uncover the
431
truth of life and surpass literary conventions and taboos. Herling-Grudzinski

could repeat after Mrai that he is interested in literature and not in the literary
life (44), that he finds golden thoughts and fictional stories without ties to
experience boring. Herling-Grudzinski and Gombrowicz would underwrite
Mrais protest against a literature of pretty words (2: 256). It is perhaps precisely for this reason that diary writing was so important to them: in post-1945
East-Central European literature it was the only genre that allowed neither
the emptiness of pretty words nor Orwells news-speak.
Works Cited
Booth, Wayne. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1961.
Gombrowicz, Witold. Dziennik 19531956 (Diary 19531956). Paris: Instytut Literacki,
1971.
Hay, Julius. Geboren 1900 (Born in 1900. Recollections). Reinbek bei Hamburg: Wegner,
1971.
Herling-Grudzinski, Gustaw, and Wodzimierz Bolecki. Rozmowy w Dragonei (Conversations
in Dragonea). Ed. Wodzimierz Bolecki. Warsaw: Szpak, 1997.
Herling-Grudzinski, Gustaw, and Wodzimierz Bolecki. Rozmowy w Neapolu (Conversations
in Naples). Warsaw: Szpak, 2000
Marek of the Polish Inny swiat. London: Gryf, 1953.
Herling-Grudzinski, Gustaw. Dziennik pisany noca 19712000 (Diary Written at Night
19712000). 7 vols. Warsaw: Czytelnik, 19952000.
Herling-Grudzinski, Gustaw. Dziennik pisany noca 19711988 (Diary Written at Night
19711988). 4 vols. Paris: Instytut Literacki, 197389.
Lubbock, Percy. The Craft of Fiction. 1921. New York: Viking, 1957.
Mrai, Sndor. A gyertyk csonkig gnek (The Candels Burn to their Stump). Budapest: Rvai,
1942. Italian trans. Marinella DAlessandro as Le braci. Milano: Adelphi, 1998. English
trans. Carol Brown Janeway (from the German) as Embers. New York: Knopf, 2001.
Polish trans. Feliks Netz as Zar. Warsaw: Czytelnik, 2000.
Mrai, Sndor. Napl (19431944) (Diary 194344). Budapest: Rvai, 1945.
Mrai, Sndor. Napl (19451957) (Diary 194557). Washington DC: Occidental P, 1958.
Mrai, Sndor. Napl (19581967) (Diary 195867). Authors ed. 1968. Munich: jvry
Griff, 1977.
Mrai, Sndor. Dziennik (fragmenty) (Diary [covering the years 194389]). Trans. Teresa Worowska. 3 vols. Warsaw: Czytelnik, 2004.
Mrai, Sndor. Egy polgr vallomsai (Confessions of a Citoyen). Budapest: Pantheon, 1934.
Trans. Teresa Worowska as Wyznania patrycjusza. Warsaw: Czytelnik, 2002.
Wat, Aleksander. My Century. The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual. Ed. and trans. Richard Lurie,
foreword Czesaw Miosz. Berkeley etc.: U of California P, 1988. Abbr. translation of Mj
wiek. Pamietnik mwiony. 2 vols. London: Book Fund Ltd., 1977.
Wat, Aleksander. Semantyka jezyka stalinowskiego (The Semantics of the Stalinist Language).
Poznan: SIW, 1981.
432
Is There a Place Like Home? Jewish Narratives

of Exile and Homecoming in Late
Twentieth-Century East-Central Europe
Ksenia Polouektova
Exile, it says somewhere in the Satanic Verses, is a dream of glorious

return. But the dream fades, the imagined return stops feeling
glorious. The dreamer awakes.
(Salman Rushdie, A Dream of Glorious Return 182)
Throughout his two-and-a-half decades of exile, Romanian-born poet and essayist Andrei Codrescu had been nursing many fantasies of return, all of
them triumphant, involving Bucharest in late summer or fall:
I saw myself at a sidewalk caf, drinking the new wine, in animated conversation with the
friends of my youth. Now and then a spray of linden flowers would descend gently from
the trees above us to land in the wine and in our hair. The girls had deep black eyes and
long raven black hair. We were, all of us, exactly the way I left us, in the faraway autumn
of 1965 when I took the airplane to another world. [] I came back countless times in
my fantasy, not always modestly unannounced. Sometimes I pulled up to the famous
Capsa Caf in Bucharest, the meeting place of venerable writers for over a century, in a
convertible white Cadillac with the poets laurel crown at a jaunty angle on my long
tresses. I could see the astonished faces of the venerable writers descended from the
covers of books for just this occasion. Ive come to rejoin Romanian literature, I said
casually, the ash from my expensive cigarette falling languorously on a gold ashtray held
by one of my three top-hatted dwarfs (The Hole in the Flag 16).
The sudden explosion of history that swept across East-Central Europe in

1989 made even the most extravagant fantasies look possible. Codrescus actual return to Romania in late December 1989 did, indeed,contain all the
promises of being triumphant, and was as laden with self-conscious clichs as
his playful mental rehearsals of it. As a correspondent with Americas
National Public Radio and ABC television, Codrescu traveled to Bucharest at
the height of the festive exhilaration that followed the toppling of the Ceausescus regime, a native son who hoped to explain the meaning of these historical transformations to Americans. However, once the returnee immersed
himself into the political feuds of post-Ceausescu Romania, the euphoria of
Is There a Place Like Home? (Ksenia Polouektova)
433
both his rather theatrical homecoming (on the Budapest-Istanbul Orient Express) and of the skillfully staged democratic revolution that he came to witness turned into eeriness that began to creep in, alongside the genuine
emotional power of the events (The Hole 240). As the televised romantic
drama of the December events proved to be a scripted show, the American
journalist ceded to the Romanian poet, who discovered that he had more to
explain to himself than to his viewers overseas. Retold against the backdrop of
a snowy Bucharest with charred tanks and the facades pock-marked with bullets during the December street-fighting, the earlier dream of return into the
summery boulevards covered by a spray of linden flowers became incomprehensible to both Romanian and American audiences. It fades away. The imagined return stops feeling glorious. The dreamer awakes.
Edgar Hilsenrath went on to Tel-Aviv and New York, Celan
to Paris, Appelfeld to Jerusalem, Rezzori to Italy. And they all
know that as far as Central Europe is concerned, they cant
go home again. Its no longer there. (Stenberg 133)
Codrescus homecoming was one of many in post-communist East-Central

Europe, but very few of them were as grotesque and glorious as his imaginary
return. In May 1994, Alexander Solzhenitsyn came back to rejoin Russian literature, crossing the entire country by train from the Far East to Moscow.
With massive media coverage, and public speeches at every stop, this impressive homecoming was designed to symbolically reverse the vector of Solzhenitsyns expulsion to the west twenty years earlier. It was also meant to position him as a quasi-prophetic figure, whose return was both redemptive and
symbolic of Russias true regeneration. However, the majority of the returning exiles and migrs preferred to shun publicity and to conduct their visits
privately, often semi-secretly. They found this in good taste, and many would
have certainly found Solzhenitsyns pompous arrival to Russia and his subsequent short public career there a travesty both aesthetical and ethical. The expulsion of public intellectuals from their native country was first and foremost a political gesture; so is the exiles voluntary return an ostensible
reversal of the earlier injustice. Fear of an adoring vulgar crowd (or, perhaps,
an equally strong anxiety that there may be no crowd at all) was not the only
reason why many deferred a return trip. For forcibly exiled intellectuals, going
back can imply a symbolic undoing of the wrongs committed against them, a
forgiving and closure to what, in fact, refuses to heal and be forgiven. It also
threatens to co-opt the historical victim of the overthrown regime into the
new, no less controlling ideological discourses and exigencies of the regime
434
that allowed the return. The question of return seems particularly charged for
East-Central European exiles, and audiences at home and journalists everywhere seem especially eager to raise all of its ramifications, often to the exiles
dismay.
Norman Manea recounts a story of homecoming of another famous exiled
writer, Milan Kundera. When in 1994 he was awarded a prestigious Jaroslav
Seifert prize, an award that, in Maneas sarcastic assessment, should have reconciled the motherland to its famous wandering son (257) Kundera, who
had by then been living in France for seventeen years, refused to attend the
ceremony. In 2007 he similarly refused to pick up the Czech National Literature Prize, the first in the history of the award to do so. His gesture naturally
raised the question of whether Kundera, who has been writing in French since
the early 1990s, can still be considered a Czech writer.
In the early 1990s, Joseph Brodsky was similarly invited to return to his
native city by the Mayor of St. Petersburg, who promised him a lavish reception and a huge mansion downtown, which could only discourage Brodsky
with his professed distaste for any sort of public adulation. The visit never
materialized, although Brodskys friend Mikhail Baryshnikov recalls that the
two were entertaining the idea of a secret trip from Helsinki to Leningrad by
ferry with a tourist group. To avoid being recognized, they jokingly considered arriving in disguise, fake beard, wig and all. Nothing came of these
plans either. I do not know if I am in a state to come as a tourist, Brodsky
confessed in one of the interviews. When the journalist flinched at the word,
he explained: Well, how else? A guest is a tourist. Thats one thing. And []
I am not a metronome swinging back and forth. I probably wont do it. Its just
that a human being moves only in one direction (qtd. in Graffy 14243).
Regardless of all the posturing that one may discern in some of these
examples, the rationales of the non-returnees and the reactions of the domestic publics to them are worth pondering. Writing about exilic homecoming prompts, I shall argue, reflection on the many non-returns, on stories
of exiles that choose to remain abroad even after the gates of the homeland
had been flung wide open and the return could earn the former persona non
grata abundant comfort and popular veneration. These problematic returns
and non-returns keep the very subject of exile topical, despite the common
assumption that the very concept must have lost its relevance with the lifting
of the Iron Curtain, and, more recently, the end of the Balkan wars. Not only
does the term itself show no signs of disappearing, but its many impressions
and expressions continue to organize fields of cultural production and ideological strife. While other contributions to this volume amply discuss the
political costs implicit in the homecoming of both the exiled intellectuals and
435
their work, I shall concentrate on the cultural constructions of the conventional antithesis of home and exile, belonging and dislocation. Does homecoming really spell the end of exile, and is there much intellectual and analytical gain to be had from pitting exile and home so staunchly against each
other? What are the ruptures and continuities between the historically and
spatially bound discourses of exile and home and how do we account for
the perseverance of them despite the rapidly changing political and social
contexts?
The current academic fascination with issues of memory, time, and space,
has generated a manifest output of critical writing on exile, making the subject
an academic common place of sorts. If it is compelling to think about, as
Edward Said famously remarked, it is precisely because exile embodies the
master tropes of modernism, which affect much of twentieth-century art and
thought, such as alienation, estrangement, longing, restlessness, and displacement (Said 173). As a powerful metaphor of modern consciousness, post-Romantic condition of exile invites theoretical reflections on the relationship between nation, identity, and location (Kaplan 117122; Naficy 13). In
examining the various deployments of exile in contemporary critical theory
and across the wide range of disciplines from history to literary criticism, to
anthropology, sociology, media studies and psychoanalysis one is struck by
the sweeping thematic diversity that is being inscribed into it. It seems no
longer enough, they suggest, to think of exilic experience as predicated on the
spatial displacement, on the physical inaccessibility of home. While the idea of
home itself has been increasingly under erasure on the part of postmodern
critical theorists, the condition of exile is universalized and diffused to the extent that most of the social, political, and economic and cultural issues of
today appear to produce their own exiles: from ones body, gender, selfhood, culture, community, etc.
In his essay Exile, Nomadism and Diaspora John Durham Peters explores a wide range of theological, philosophical, and political uses of different mobility concepts. Out of them all, he argues, the notion of exile is the one
that most explicitly evokes a home place (19). Unlike nomadism and diaspora,
for instance, that entail adaptability and accommodation to the foreign context, the traditional understanding of exile presents it as a melancholic, solitary state that is heavily dependent on the idea of home being elsewhere, inapproachable and remote. The very waiting for the possibility to return sums
up the essence of the exilic being: if he [sic!] stops waiting and adapts to the
new circumstances, then he is not an exile anymore, argues Mary McCarthy
in her own taxonomy of exiles, expatriates, and internal migrs (49). In a situation of exilic uprootedness, the yearning for a home that is the locus of se-
436
cure identity and completeness inspires nostalgic compensatory projections

of former stability, coherence and happiness (Lupton 34). To sustain the exilic identity, then, means to defer endlessly the exilic homecoming, so that
home remains an impossible, inaccessible object of desire.
In contrast to the exile that pins for a fixed location in time and space, a
nomad does away with the very idea of such attachment, defying the spatial
anchoring of home in order to make it portable and endlessly replicable anywhere and everywhere. Nomadism rewrites the nostalgic axiom of there is
no place like home to ask whether there is such a place as home to begin
with. Different stances towards home and belonging, Peters argues, places
exile and nomadism on the opposite poles of contemporary debate about
identity. Discourses of exile operate within the primordial holistic understanding of the self that considers cultural belonging (home) to be the essential attribute of being. Nomadism, on the contrary, perceives identity as
constructed and challenges the power of places and attachments to settle and
define its freely roving subject. Exile and the attendant discourse of nostalgia,
adds Caren Kaplan following dean McCannel, expresses the propensity of the
occidental moderns to look elsewhere for markers of reality and authenticity while celebrating alienation and distance (qtd in Kaplan 34). Nomadism,
then, is the articulation that recycles some of the tropes of Romanticism in
order to defy the settled power, and it regards all forms of belonging and identity not as rigorous givens, but as subjects to construction and (re)invention.
Does this mean that exilic discourse is necessarily rendered obsolete by the
postmodernist deconstructions of home/identity, and that contemporary
western mobility has effectively turned us all, however differently, into easily
adapting nomads, indifferent to roots and cultural anchors? Hardly. The dichotomy of exile versus nomadism, as Peters remarks, is metaphorical rather
than historical and refers to attitudes, not to experiences that are not always
chosen freely (38). Obviously, theoretical readings of exile that uncritically
conflate various kinds of displacements and estrangements in the name of the
perennially suffering postmodern/post-colonial/subaltern, or artistic subject, obscure what Said called the unbearable historicity of the exilic condition. However, exile continues to be an idiom readily available for both description of the actual experience and the general attitude of the mind as long
as the political authorities maintain the power to expel and to settle. Exile and
nomadism possess a remarkable capacity to evolve and nearly merge, even
beyond the historical conditions that give birth to them marking the moment of continuity, rather than rupture, between the modernist and postmodernist discourses of identity. Thus, exile, as my reading of the literary exiles
autobiographical writing shows, can be conscious of the impossibility of
437
home, of existential homelessness unhousedness in George Steiners

terms just as well as of an at-homeness in the world, the cosmopolitan
feeling of being at home anywhere (Steiner 326). Ultimately, both nomads and
exiles move in a post-structuralist theoretical landscape today, pass the ruined
houses of criticism, historiography, and intellectual certitude (Chambers 18).
The traces of affiliation language, culture and myths of origin no longer
lead them back to authenticity and roots, but, as Iain Chambers deftly put
it, linger on as [] voices, memories, and murmurs that are mixed in with
other stories, episodes, encounters (19).
Articulating exile and home, the narratives of homecoming analyzed here
probe the relationship between the metaphorical and the historical, the literary and the literal. They are situated at the intersection of intimate self-portraiture, family biography, political commentary, and philosophical reflection,
speaking therefore in multiple voices: personal, communal, mythological,
political, and poetic. As any first-person testimonial narrative, this autobiographical writing is first and furthermost an exercise in self-(re)invention that
reveals and remembers as much as it fictionalizes and forgets, ever mindful of the different audiences it addresses and the multiple rhetorical registers
on which it operates. The authors awareness of and sensitivity to the broader
cultural discourses of exile and home, as well as their current theoretical
deconstruction, make these accounts of homecoming at once highly wrought
in style, and self-conscious of the narrative and rhetorical strategies that they
employ, self-ironic and self-reflexive. Since I am reading exile and home
through autobiographies, I am interested in their tropes, themes, and structural features, which help, on the one hand, to delineate the polyphonic corpus of exilic storytelling, and offer, on the other, new readings of modernist
and post-modernist discourses of exile and home.
At the same time, alongside the narrative constructions of exile through
autobiographical writing, I shall look at the historically and culturally specific
discourses at play in these autobiographies. The four authors and five texts I
have selected for this paper offer an interesting range of variations on the
theme of twentieth-century East-Central European exile. They come from
different cultures and generations: two are Romanian (Norman Manea and
Andrei Codrescu), one is Hungarian (Susan Rubin Suleiman) and one is
Polish (Eva Hoffman). Each had a different trajectory of leaving home and
returning to it, complicating, as it were, the purist definition of exile. For instance, Hoffman and Suleiman, having emigrated to North American as
children, could and did first return to East-Central Europe before 1989. Andrei Codrescu and Norman Manea, both genuine exiles, could only come
back after the demise of the communist regimes. Yet at the same time, it is the
438
authors Jewishness, I shall argue, that weaves these diverse narratives together across the circumstantial and cultural differences. In a crucial way, all
of the texts I shall analyze are returns to a post-Shoah East-Central Europe
that ceased being home to Jewish exiles before their actual departure or
even birth, thereby adding new meanings, both historical and ontological, to
the notion of exilic consciousness. By reading the exiles autobiographies
both as narrative performances and instances of particular cultural and historical discourses, I probe at the relationship between constructions of EastCentral European exile and return, and the twentieth-century Jewish narratives of exile and (impossible) homecoming. How do contemporary American intellectuals and culture-makers of East-Central European and, importantly, Jewish descent, map the post-Shoah and post-communist Europe in
their autobiographical writing? What is the function of the exiles Jewishness
in the narratives of non-return? How does one ever return to the home that
is no more?
[W]riters in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates,
are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to
look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of
salt. But if we do look back, we also do so in the knowledge
which gives rise to profound uncertainties that our physical
alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will
not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost:
that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands. Indias of the
mind. (Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 10)
For an exiled writer still pining for home, the native realm is a terrain of artistic-imaginative recreation and of heightened memory that sublimate the
impossible homecoming. To live out ones own fantasy of return would mean
to endanger the elegiac completeness of what Michael Siedel, following Nabokov, calls the unreal, narrative estate, to surrender the imaginary homeland to the actuality of the place (5). Homecoming calls into question exilic
identity, the workings of memory, the relationship to both the old and the new
home places, as well as the romantic cultural and political discourses of nostalgia associated with these relationships. Because homecoming is a choice
while exile is usually not reflections on the possibility of going back, the
journey itself and the subsequent narrativization of both the return and of
the life entire problematize the exilic status of the writer while challenging
the conception of exile as something stable, a-historical, and wholly imposed
from without. Return to the place of origin, whether actual or imagined, un-
439
locks the ambiguous relationship between home and homeland. It puts to the
test both individual expectations and the more general cultural idea of nostalgia, which, as Svetlana Boym deftly remarks, often falters at the actual reunion, not unlike other long-distance relationships (xiii). In my readings of
narratives of homecoming, both fictionalized rehearsed through writing
and actual, I look at the ways in which the authors constructions of home and
belonging reaffirm, deconstruct, or undermine nostalgia in relation to both
the individual trajectory of an exiles life story and the political meta-narrative
of personal and national salvation.
Exile and nostalgia are traditionally conceived of as inseparable. The incessant yearning to return home is what distinguishes exiles from migrs, expatriates, or nomads who accommodate themselves to the foreign country.
The original meaning of the term used to be limited to those long separated
from their homelands travelers, merchants, sailors, soldiers, etc. to whom
a special medical healing method had to be applied in case the real return was
impossible. Gradually, however, nostalgia came to mean the yearning for the
temps perdu, not the patria, but the past (Peters 30). As such, it does not only reflect the idiosyncrasy of an individual psyche, but is an essential attribute of
modern consciousness, which cherishes the myth that authenticity is associated with traditional societies, and a slower pace of life untouched by the
sweeping forces of modernization and progress. Childhood is an archetypical
object of such nostalgia, with its carelessness and obliviousness to the passing
of time. Not only the past itself is nostalgically mourned as lost and irretrievable. To recall Pierre Noras famous utterance, modern consciousness also laments the disappearance of memory itself in its most archaic, pristine, spontaneous form that could have given us an unmediated access to the past (7).
Modern nostalgia is fundamentally self-conscious of its own futility. Having
lost the idealism and innocence of traditional religious consciousness, modernity has made a cultural predicament out of auto-reflexivity and skepticism. Hence modern discourses of nostalgia are staked out by the two fundamental impulses of modernity: a utopian longing for a more harmonious past
on the one hand, and incredulity towards its own myths on the other; they
are enamored of distance, not of the referent itself (Stewart 145).
Long after the eighteenth-century prescriptions of opium, leeches, and
trips to the Alps have gone out of medical fashion as treatments against nostalgia, there seem to remain two interconnected antidotes for the nostalgic
restlessness: the realization of ones desire through the actual homecoming,
and the exercise of historical consciousness. Nostalgia, writes Svetlana
Boym in her seminal study of the subject, is a rebellion against the modern
idea of time, the time of history and progress. The nostalgic desires to oblit-
440
erate history and turn it into private or collective mythology, to revisit time
like space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the
human condition (xv).
In what follows I shall examine nostos (homecoming) as a potential cure for
algia (painful condition), to see what happens when the space of the past is literally revisited. I shall explore it through the accounts of intellectuals and culture-makers that have accomplished the feat of return and documented it in
their autobiographical writing: Eva Hoffman, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Andrei
Codrescu and Norman Manea. These accounts trace individual journeys of
homecoming, and work against nostalgias obliterations of history by interrogating the trustworthiness of personal memory and by considering the individual in collective terms, as part of the shared historical experience. The intersection of the personal memories with the larger historical narrative opens
up a space for irony and self-reflexivity, for anguish or distress, shame or ambivalence in short, for sentiments that are quite different from nostalgic
sentimentalism and can shatter the idealized India of the mind.
In her autobiographical novel Natura the Polish-born writer Maria Kuncewiczowa describes her return to the town of Kazimierz. An American citizen
since 1955, she first came back for a visit in 1958 and moving to Poland permanently in 1968. Kuncewiczowa registers a shock of recognition, not familiarity, at the encounter with her old house: My house in Kazimierz where
Ive returned, is now standing in a world thats completely different from the
one in which it was built. And I am different too I now see my house not so
much as my regained living quarters, but as a historical monument (qtd. in
Zaborowska vii, x). The experience of her lost home, the place once inhabited
that marks simultaneously the passing of her autobiographical time and the
site of history, is a key to the narrative of the returning exile for it embodies
the relationship between history and autobiographical memory. The main
thrust of the autobiographical accounts of return, indeed the main tension
that underlies them, so deftly expressed by Kuncewiczova, is the struggle to
reinsert ones own idiosyncratic life story into a shared historical predicament,
to see, as Susan Rubin Suleiman puts it, the personal in historical terms, as
part of a collective experience (Budapest Diary 163). Yet equally strong is the
impulse to wrestle the idiosyncratic and the intimate from the personal and
parental pasts (however distressing, embarrassing, even humiliating it might
be) by admitting their complexity and ambiguities that resist both the unproblematic closures of historization and a-historical nostalgia.
The dual fit of writing your own life history in and out of the larger historical narrative helps to disentangle, in Hoffmans words, the easy pieties of
441
memory from historys difficult and complex truths; it is made possible by

the authors awareness of and sensitivity to the sentimental discourses of
homecoming into which their own journeys of return may potentially be
co-opted (qtd. in Kreisler, n.p.). Discussing the accounts of retournees in
her recent work on the emergence of the Holocaust discourse in post-war
western societies, Hoffman admits to being weary of the ready-made metaphors and the pre-fabricated observations, a sentiment that permeates her
own, extremely and even painfully, self-conscious writing (After Such Knowledge
204). Both Hoffman and Suleiman are involved in the subject of exile, not
only emotionally, by virtue of their lived experience, but also intellectually.
Eva Hoffman has been a professor of literature and of creative writing at several American institutions, including Columbia, Tufts and MIT, and Susan
Rubin Suleiman was editor of and contributor to the 1998 anthology titled
Exile and Creativity: Signposts, Travelers, Outsiders, Backward Glances.
Many other similarities in biographical circumstances suggest a comparative reading of Suleimans and Hoffmans narratives of homecoming. As
we shall shortly see, their accounts are, however, very different, and so are the
exilic identities that they (de)construct therein. Both Suleiman and Hoffman
are daughters of Holocaust survivors. Hoffmans parents were hidden by a
local peasant in the small Polish shtetl of Zalozce (now Ukraine) while most of
the extended family perished. Susan Rubin Suleiman is a child-survivor of
what she calls a generation. She was about to turn five when the deportations of the Hungarian Jews started in the summer of 1944; her parents procured forged identity papers, enabling them to get a job as caretakers at a Gentile estate in the hills of Buda. Hoffmans family left Cracow for Vancouver,
Canada in 1959, seizing on the temporal lifting of the ban on the emigration
of Polands Jewish population. Ewa was thirteen years old at the time. The ten
year-old Susan fled with her family illegally in 1949, moving through Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Haiti before finally settling in the United States.
Both Rubin Suleiman and Hoffman were educated at Harvard, and received
their PhDs in literature; both have made successful academic and public careers in the United States with English as their language of artistic and professional expression.
No less importantly, both Hoffman and Rubin Suleiman underwent name
changes in emigration. Ewa became Eva, and Zsuzsa was renamed
Susan. Although Susan reminisces in passing on her mothers and grandmothers affectionate way of calling her Zsuzsika, the memory of another,
earlier, and much more disturbing identity change seems to carry more weight
for her: she was taught by her mother another Christian name, Mary, as a way
of protecting the familys false identity during the war-years. Once in the
442
States and pursuing an academic career, Susan chose to be rather called/

known by her ex-husbands last name (Suleiman) rather than by her Hungarian family name (Rubin) alone. It is Hoffman, though, who has more to say on
the effects of what she calls careless baptism (Lost 105). However insignificant the name change might seem within each narrative, it shows how the preexilic past functions within the the authors identity. For Hoffman, the namechange literally embodies two familiar tropes that describe the initiation into
exile: a split into two selves, and a second birth. Adoption of a new name, this
standard rite of passage, marks the emigrants embrace of Americanness (or
Canadianness). The thirteen-year-old Ewa experiences this as a cultural dispossession, all the more shattering as it touches on both the national and the
most intimate familial aspect of her being:
Nothing much has happened, except a small, seismic mental shift. The twist in our
names (her sister Alina becomes Elaine K.P.), takes them a tiny distance from us but its a
gap into which the infinite hobgoblin of abstraction enters.[] These new appellations,
which we ourselves cannot yet pronounce, are not us. They are identification tags, disembodied signs pointing to objects that happen to be my sister and myself. We walk to
our seats in a roomful of unknown faces, with names that make us strangers to ourselves.
When the school day is over, the teacher hands us a file card on which she has written:
Im a newcomer. Im lost. I live at 1785 Granville Street. Will you kindly show me how
to get there? Thank you (Lost 105).
An incessant awareness of this mental shift that splits the Canadian Eva off
from the Polish Ewa, is central to Hoffmans exilic consciousness. She is, indeed, a perfect case of Kristevas trangere elle-mme, which she directly evokes
in the passage quoted above. She is just as estranged from her earlier self as
from the new cultural environment around her. The space of her exile is, then,
an unbridgeable gap, her Great Divide as Hoffman calls it, between two
names, two vocabularies, and two cultural systems. And this gap can never be
fully closed for she cannot have one name again (Lost 272).
The largest presence within me is the welling up of absence, of what I have
lost she writes, a feeling that she compares to pregnancy without the possibility of birth (Lost 115). But this absence is recompensed by the gift of a bicultural consciousness that allows her to shuffle between her allegiances to
both cultures, and to perform the difficult balancing act of translation and
reconciliation. The very title of Hoffmans memoirs reveals that the acquisition of the new language is a means of remedying her otherness, however
partially. The conquest of English becomes not only an emancipatory gesture that grants her acceptance and freedom of expression in the new society,
it also facilitates a cultural translation of her Polishness, however incomplete,
into that newly conquered space.
443
In her study of literary bilingualism, Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour argues that

bilingual and polyglot writers should not be considered a mere sum of their
languages, but a much more complex phenomenon, involving a different
form of celebral organization for language, a different degree of cognitive
flexibility, and a heightened responsibility to the language bred by the incessant awareness of the relativity of all the linguistic codes that they employ. Although bilingual writers, especially those who are forced to switch languages
by the circumstances of their emigration or exile, are often obsessed with trying to maintain the purity of their mother tongue, this linguistic innocence
is hardly ever possible, for the active use of the two languages makes up for an
integrated whole, an intricate configuration that cannot be easily decomposed
into two independent parts (Beaujour 2627). The concluding remarks of
Eva Hoffmans autobiography capture the essence of bilingual consciousness
well:
No, theres no returning to the point of origin, no regaining of childhood unity. []
Polish is no longer the one, true language against which others live their secondary life.
Polish insights cannot be regained in their purity; theres something I know in English
too. [] When I speak Polish now, it is infiltrated, permeated, and inflected by the English in my head. [] Each language makes the other relative. (Lost 273)
The native and adopted language cross-fertilize, challenge and shuddup (i.e.,
shut up) each other, so that the writer uses each of them in radically different
ways from somebody who is monolingual. The incessant tension between the
two semiotic systems brings forth a third language state that is structured by the
incessant awareness of the fissures and fractures between linguistic building
blocks of ones consciousness (Lost 273). The relativity of cultural meanings,
revealed to her by the fundamentally frustrating feat of cultural translation, is
the point where Hoffmans memoir enters into a diverse field of critical theory
that allows her to intellectualize and theorize her experience beyond its historical and biographical specificity, often at the cost of it. Her urge to deconstruct every apparently stable certainty is turning against itself again and again
throughout the narrative, seeking meaning and exposing its relativity, claiming
location in the very states of ambivalence and doubt (Fjellestad 142; Proefridt
124). Self-conscious references to psychoanalytical theory, structuralism, poststructuralism and postmodern philosophy generate a meta-commentary that,
however overwhelming its deconstructivist urge, allows Hoffman to turn her
manifold otherness into a form of normalized identity. Exile (the title of
the second part of her memoir) ceases to be her temporal private state of being
and becomes permanent and shared in the New World that she is about to
enter (the title of the third part) once she abstracts it away as an archetypical
condition of contemporary lives. The being lost written on her old school
444
file card has become a location in itself, one that she shares with so many displaced, exiled, and uprooted others, by fate or by choice, by the very ethos of
changeability and relativism of their times:
In a splintered society, what does one assimilate to? Perhaps the very splintering itself.
[] I share with my American generation an acute sense of dislocation and the equally
acute challenge of having to invent a place and an identity for myself without the traditional supports. It could be said that the generation I belong to has been characterized by
its prolonged refusal to assimilate and it is in my very uprootedness that Im its
member (Lost 197).
The abundance of psychoanalytical terminology and references to Lacan and

Freud, as well as the writers own experiences with an analyst, suggest that
Hoffmans memoir is not just an account of her life but also a form of therapy,
an exercise in explaining herself to herself, in translating backwards her
complex otherness that could possibly reconcile the competing voices in her,
so that in the end a more cohesive self emerges, a person who judges the
voices and tells the stories (Lost 2712). The process resists straight narratives, any confidently thrusting story line as sentimentality and untruth to
the many splinters and fragments of her self. Despite the retrospective, chronological shape of her autobiography, Hoffman chooses to tell her story in
the present tense, a liberating decision, as she admits, that holographs her
exilic experience as a permanent and multifaceted condition, in which she is
free to go back and forth into the past, not to heal the spatial or temporal rifts,
but to make sure that I one person, first person singular have been on
both sides (Kreisler; Hoffman, Lost 273).
Susan Suleiman does not seem to share Hoffmans sense of the bifurcated
self, and admits to have drawn a clear line separating her Hungarian childhood from the rest of her life. But, then, she was three years younger at the
time of her departure and has, perhaps, fewer memories of her birthplace: It
was as if a door had shut behind me when I left, sealing the first 10 years of my
life in an air-tight room. For 35 years I had managed not to give much thought
to that room. What would happen now that I had turned the knob on the
door? (Diary 20)
Return to the country of origin and to a past that is quite literally a foreign
country, inevitably implies risking who one is to borrow the title of the
book that Susan Suleiman wrote while in residence at the Collegium Budapest. Whether this personal history has been sealed off in an air-tight room as
in Suleimans admission, or carried within like some private heaviness, an
embryo that can neither be aborted nor given birth to, as in Hoffmans
striking metaphor, the return destabilizes the very notions of being native and
foreign.
445
In the introductory chapter of Budapest Diary that Suleiman tellingly titles

Forgetting Budapest, she briefly tells the story of her familys escape from
Hungary and her career in the United States. Apart from her fleeting involvement in relief efforts organized on her campus for the refugees of the 1956
revolution, Suleimans life in America had nothing to do with the place and
the culture in which she had spent the first ten years of her life. She learns
French, and returns to Harvard as professor of comparative literature and
culture, spending long periods of research and writing in Paris, the place that
she refers to throughout her Budapest Diary as the most beautiful city in the
world, and a country of choice (59, 63). She passes her love of the French
language on to both of her sons, but does not teach them Hungarian or anything about their Hungarian heritage. The very term heritage, she argues, is
for her as for any other European Jew inherently ambivalent:
Were the picturesque horsemen of the Hungarian plains, not far from my mothers birthplace, part of me or my childrens heritage? Then what about the Jewish laws of the
1920s and 1930s, which barred access to university education for all but a few Jews, or
the murder of thousands on the streets of Budapest by Hungarian Nazis in the fall and
winter 1944? Were they part of my heritage too? (Diary 9)
Reflecting on her first return to Budapest that she and her two young sons
spent pursuing all the usual tourist entertainments, Suleiman is aware that she
had chosen the most impersonal, most ritualized way of revisiting her native
city after thirty-five years of absence. She wonders whether this detached
identity of a tourist that she had adopted for herself on this first visit reflected
something of her estrangement from her native city, which failed to immediately trigger waves of sentimental recognition in her. What she registers after
her visit to her childhood house on Akcfa utca is not disappointment at not
being moved but rather a sober awareness that emotional involvement with
the place and recapturing the meaning it once held for her would require a
connection with the people who once inhabited this house with herself and
her parents.
The opportunity avails itself several years after the death of her mother,
when the Collegium Budapest offers her a fellowship for the first half of
1993. The rest of the Budapest Diary documents Suleimans stay in Budapest
and her quest for the traces of her family history, and the papers attesting to
her birth and the births of her parents. Hence the subtitle of the book In Search
of the Motherbook, which alludes to the Hungarian expression copies of official
documents. She keeps a diary and does research in order to mourn her
mother, and to un-forget what she has forgotten.
The two conflicting relationships that Suleiman flags in her introduction
the relationship between her Jewishness and Hungarianness, and the relation-
446
ship with her mother are interconnected insofar as they both seem instrumental in her forgetting Budapest, in estranging herself from it the way she
felt estranged from her mother. Once in Budapest again, she resorts to the
familiar tourist mode: exploring the city as any other visitor would, taking
cabs instead of public transportation, observing the locals with the detached
eye of a foreigner who speaks the language but can never be sure whether she
has a full grasp of the subtleties and nuances of the cultural content behind
the words. Suleiman is conscious of her difference, of sticking out here like a
sore thumb, and she does not seem to mind it (Diary 57). It is not only the
slight accent in her Hungarian that gives her away as an outsider. When she
asks an acquaintance whether she can pass as a native, she is told of her
foreign-sounding intonations; she seems reconciled to the fact that she can
never be a real Hungarian but also refuses to be considered an ordinary
American, setting the record straight when a colleague mistakes her for one.
I do have a connection here, she asserts. But what is this connection and
what is she then? (58, 81, 9596)
Rather than reclaiming an identity through belonging, Suleiman continuously affirms not-fitting in as her major modus operandi. Her return is geared
not towards embracing her Hungarianness but rather proving to herself yet
again that she does not completely fit anywhere, not even in her native city
(95). Elsewhere she remarks that her sense of affinity with the Hungarian
community in the United States is minimal, reserved for people with whom
she has professional, academic connections. In a conversation with her friend
Julie, also a Hungarian emigrant and a Jew, Suleiman says she does feel Hungarian, but that this statement always needs to be qualified if one is a Jew
(92). Jewishness as an epitome of otherness offers an identity of inherently
not-fitting-in, of trying to pass and never really succeeding, an identity that
implies and excuses ambivalence towards and estrangement from the majority culture.
The question is, however, how much of this is constructed in an affirmative
gesture towards ones own foreignness in the city of birth, and how much of it
is forced upon Suleiman by the dramatic experiences of the Holocaust that
loom large in her childhood memories in Budapest. The matter is very private
and sensitive, leading to a question about the reception of Suleimans memoirs in Hungary, which is, unfortunately, beyond the scope of this paper. It
seems that Jewishness, rather than Hungarianness, offers Suleiman the link to
her war-time childhood, sustaining a sense of incomplete and problematic
connection to contemporary Hungary.
For Hoffman, the Jewish and Polish parts of her history, identity, and loyalties coexist and infringe upon each other, refusing to separate or to reconcile
447
(Exit into History 101). Growing up in post-war Poland, she identifies with the
words of the Polish-Jewish poet Aleksander Wat, who always defined himself as
Jewish-Jewish and Polish-Polish without ranking the adjectives. Parenthetically, Wat converted to Christianity during his incarceration in the Soviet
Union. Unlike Suleiman, whose idea of Hungarian heritage is irreversibly
tainted by the countrys history of anti-Semitism and collaboration, Hoffman
incessantly shuffles between her allegiances to Poland and her Jewishness:
At the very moments my attachment to Poland, my admiration for all that is powerful in
its culture is strongest, I upbraid myself for insufficient vigilance on behalf of those who
suffered here, on behalf really, of my parents who survived the Holocaust in awful circumstances here. Every time I hear Poland described as an anti-Semitic country, I bridle
in revolt, for that I know that reality is far more tangled than that (Kreisler).
Suleiman does not attempt reconciliation, but rather pits both parts of her
history against each other, inhabiting the good old inbetweenness. Her perception of contemporary Hungarian society and her interest in current
politics (she closely follows the rise of the right-wing and the chauvinistic and
anti-Semitic rhetoric of its leader Istvn Csurka) is invariably filtered through
her private memories and her knowledge of the Jewish historical experience
in Hungary. A characteristic entry during her June visit to Pcs describes her
visit to the synagogue and a conversation with an elderly porter, who tells her
about the deportations that had wiped out the local Jewish community. Later
that day she records a conversation at a party, in which someone remarks: It
is dangerous to be a Jew in Hungary. When? somebody asks him, in the
1930s or 1940s, or do you mean now? Always, he answered (153).
While Jewishness opens questions about a collective Jewish historical fate,
inquiry into her familys history offers important correctives to this impersonal meta-narrative, a fuller, but perhaps also more ambivalent past (Burstein 801, 822). Despite the initial impulse of identifying with her parents, Suleimans search for the Motherbook imbues her parents lives with a
meaning that is independent of their entanglement with hers, making some of
her inquiries seem almost intrusive. She learns about her Mothers first and
lost love, her fathers repeated infidelities, her parents feuds over their mismatched marriage, and about Hungarian anti-Semitism that well predated the
outbreak of World War II. There can be no nostalgia for that world, so much
is clear, although the final statement of the Diary, related to Suleimans 1994
visit, sounds oddly upbeat. Having folded the past and present together like
those family papers that she has found during her visits to Hungary, Suleiman
concludes: [These documents] tell a story, however minimal: A girl is born,
marries and gives birth to a girl. The continuity of generations has prevailed
over war and destruction, and I am the beneficiary of this victory (219).
448
This minimal story seems to obfuscate another, less reconciliatory, one

that the Diary left untold. When asked whether she had acquired a feeling of
at-homeness in Budapest, she responds that she certainly did find home
here; not the home, sentimentalized found at last, but rather another place,
like Boston and Paris, where she feels at home and which would not slam the
door shut behind [her] as [she] leaves (14). The process of displacement/replacement, which Ive thought of as the pattern of my life each new home
displacing the one before it no longer adds, she concluded: Budapest
doesnt displace or replace any other home but is added to them (171).
Yet three years after her stay in the Collegium, Suleiman publishes a study
of the Holocaust memoirs written by Hungarian women-survivors, Monuments in a Foreign Tongue, which expresses a sentiment radically different
from the unproblematic resolution of her previous visits. Her compelling interest in these memoirs is certainly not accidental; it is another means to revisit and re-member her own war-time experience. The accented voices of the
women-writers she reads bring to her mind not only locales like Szombathely
or Tolcsva, but Hungary in general, not just the diminutive names like Bandi,
Laci, or Ica, but Hungarian men and women. She savors these sounds, but the
signified behind them are decidedly historical. They evoke places and people
gone, not the present-day Hungary she has recently visited:
But its not todays Hungary, or todays Hungarians, that these names evoke most vividly:
to go to Szombathely is not my desire. (I have been to Nyregyhza, my mothers birthplace once is enough.) [] The name resurrects the lost objects, but at the same time
reinforces the sense of their pastness, their goneness. These people, these places (as they
were, towns with many Jews in them) no longer exist (Monuments 65051).
The theme of chance versus choice haunts most Suleimans reading of these
memoirs. She returns to the episode that she had already recounted in her Budapest Diary how she and her mother miraculously escaped from their house
in Budapest during the rounding up of the Jews, which could have ended tragically, for the concierge (who certainly knew their true identity) could have given
them away to the soldiers (Diary 33). Yet the concierge pretended to ignore
them and the family survived. The study of the Holocaust autobiographies occasions yet another return to Suleimans own spectral biography of conditional tense, of what if. This time, however, it is not about the life she could
have led if she did not emigrate. The moment of rupture, of loss, she realizes,
predates the familys departure from Hungary in 1949, and return is impossible
since there is no pre-Holocaust place as it was to return to:
Budapest has a flourishing Jewish community, the largest in Eastern Europe. Its a
beautiful city, wonderful to visit briefly or for longer sojourns. But once you have left it
as a Holocaust survivor, there is no going back, not for good: you have no family there,
449
the few who may have remained have died or will do so very soon. In this respect, Budapest is like other Hungarian cities or towns, even though most of the Jewish population escaped extermination (Monuments 651).
Suleimans remark echoes statements of many other East European exiles and
migrs of Jewish origins, such as Andrei Codrescu, Aharon Appelfeld, Susan
Vaga, Helen Epstein, Henryk Grynberg, and Norman Manea, all of which suggest that for Jews the discourse of exilic homecoming has been thoroughly inflected by the Holocaust, which had made the notion of an East-Central European home questionable already before the establishment of brutal
communist regimes across the region. In her seminal study of the poetics of
exile and return in the modern Jewish imagination, Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi argues that the dramatic experiences of the twentieth century, the Holocaust
and the creation of the secular Jewish state in Palestine have radically challenged the romantic discourses of Jewish homecoming (not the traditional religious/messianic longing for the Next year in Jerusalem! of the Passover
seder, but rather the secular nationalist, Zionist, use of it). The disappointments
and trivialities of the mass immigration to Israel undermine the romantic premises of the Zionist program of ingathering the exiles, built around the notions
of closure, redemption, and normalization of the supposedly unnatural exilic
condition of the Diaspora Jews. At the same time, the Holocaust has all but
eliminated the Jews in some historically most Jewish lands (Galicia, Bukovina,
Lithuania), turning these into sites of pilgrimage, of symbolic homecoming
for Israeli and North-American Jews. This, however, is a homecoming to a
home that had been destroyed, to an unredeemed ruin, an analogue or even
a substitute for Jerusalem as the ruined shrine (Ezrahi 17).
The growing popularity of a Jewish-heritage tourism to East-Central Europe from the United States and Israel has already elicited many scholarly responses, by scholars like Zvi Gitelman, Jack Kugelmass, Rona Sheramy, Oren
Stier, Jackies Feldman, Ruth Gruber, and Erica Lehrer to name just a few. The
usual criticism dismisses the practice of such pilgrimages as scripted, nondialogical reenactments of the past that prevent genuine intellectual or emotional engagement with both the past and the present of the countries visited.
The sites of the formerly thriving Jewish communities function as mere theater props; none of their present-day actuality and vividness matters to the
tourists. It is this culture of returns and of the literature it produces that Eva
Hoffman ironically characterizes as standard accounts, written with predictable frameworks of perception and featuring standard tropes: Poland as one
big cemetery; the mean peasants facing visitors with their closed faces; the
gaping sense of absence, of nothingness, where the Jews had once been, the
anti-Semitism one can feel in the very air (After Such Knowledge 203204).
450
Andrei Codrescu, who returned to Bucharest and his native Sibiu after
twenty-five years of exile via Budapest, deftly captures a genuine sense of historical loss at the sight of former Jewish communities. Hungary, he confesses,
made him feel the insistent mystery of his Jewishness, for the country was
once home to hundreds of thousands of Jews, including his two great-aunts,
who lived here and then were taken to Auschwitz and were no more (The
Hole 57). It is noteworthy that the experience of absence, of loss and decay, is
what triggers Codrescus reminiscences of his Jewish roots, recalling for the
first time in his narrative his Hungarian Jewish origins (and his original name,
Perlmutter). Contemplating the neglected facade of the synagogue in the Dohny utca, and later joining the Hanukkah service inside and recognizing
some of his own features in the others present in the room, Codrescu experiences a strange homecoming that merges his personal history with the
larger currents of a collective Jewish fate:
As I strolled past peeling columns, peering into the winter dark at Hebrew letters on the
rows of graves in the old Jewish cemetery inside, I had the feeling that I had been here
before. I felt the chill and it was not the December cold of a once-full world that was
now empty, a deserted center that was also somehow at the center of my being. Something lost, gone, irretrievable. (59)
Codrescus emotion almost verbatim echoes that of Suleiman. Her gaze at

present-day Budapest is also a backward glance at the traumas of the past.
Eva Hoffman, however, is apprehensive of the pathetic fallacy of seeing
East-Central Europe exclusively in terms of such sentiments, rather than
appreciating the place in all its present-day actuality and concreteness. In
her 1993 travelogue Exit into History: A Journey Through the New Eastern Europe,
she abandons the explicit autobiographical mode of Lost in Translation for a
journalistic travelogue. Like Andrei Codrescu, who goes to post-communist
New Eastern Europe to witness the Romanian Revolution, Hoffman
travels to Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary at the
end of the 1980s and the early 1990s to catch history in the act (Exit x).
And, like Codrescu in The Hole in the Flag, she is also on a personal quest to recapture, however fleetingly, the lost territory of her childhood before it
disappears under the tide of Change. The autobiographical impulse is
superimposed in both texts on the rhetorical and discursive mode of a political commentary. The discursive ambiguity of the texts is paralleled by the
traveling writers own fluid identity: both are naturalized Americans born in
Eastern Europe, who had spent most of their lives in the West and are thus
neither perfect strangers nor completely confident insiders. At a first glance,
the journalistic undertaking can only benefit from the insight of ones own
biographical and emotional involvement with the subject matter. But how
451
long can the duality of allegiances and the constantly shifting vantage points
really be sustained before autobiography and political commentary collapse
into each other? Reading these autobiographical travel accounts, how does
one begin to disentangle the retrospective workings of memory and the current political and cultural discourses that shape any such venturing into the
past?
To write about ones place of origin is, perhaps, the most difficult form of
autobiography, in which objectivity and subjectivity, generalities and intimate
nuances subvert each other at every turn, instigating endless interpretations.
Embarking on her trip, Hoffman self-consciously distinguishes between the
idealized landscape that stayed arrested in [her] imagination as a land of
childhood sensuality, lyricism, vividness and human warmth the Poland
of the mind to paraphrase Rushdie and the real Eastern Europe that she
is about to re-discover (Exit v). However, her anticipation of the reality she is
going to experience and her related journalistic objectivism are also inflected by the western discourses of the Other Europe, staked out by a familiar repertoire of tropes and clichs about the region as a lifeless monochrome realm where people walked bent under the leaden weight of an awful
System, a fiction she sets out to interrogate (xii).
Hoffmans first visit to Poland took place a decade earlier, in 1977, when
she traveled to Cracow, despite her parents admonitions. In Lost in Translation
she admits to having been propelled on the first trip by a mixture of conflicting desires common to many returnees who are never quite sure whether
they have come to say hello or good-bye (Rushdie, The Dream 183).
Maybe to be done with it, Hoffman muses, or to see how the story might
have turned out (Lost 232). Upon her arrival, she delights at her ability to decode the undertones, connotations, and half-meanings of the most insignificant details around her the jostling of the street crowds, the body language,
intonations, and glances. Yet she also registers her own strangeness, having
gotten unused to what seems most natural to her Polish hosts, and what
surely must have been a norm to her family in Poland as well communal proximity, intimacy, abundance of free time, soul-searching conversations. Her
web of signification is torn asunder, and she struggles, not always successfully,
to translate some of her American background to her hosts. The reverse
translation the catching up with the Polish experiences she had missed
does not seem necessary as yet. Nothing ever changes here asserts her
friend, and to Hoffman too, Cracow remains remarkably unchanged (Lost
234, 238).
In her reading of Exit into History, Andaluna Borcila charges Hoffman with
having failed to depart from the western discourse about Eastern Europe,
452
which sees the region as a site of non-identity, of instrumental projections

and stereotyping, in short, as the quintessential other of the West (5556).
The image of communist Eastern Europe as a time-capsule of sorts, a place of
arrested history and development is, of course, both a domestic and western
commonplace of the Other Europe. Gyrgy Konrd famously quipped
that trains and movies run slower in Eastern Europe because of a slower passage of time (qtd. in Drakulic 16667). Perhaps it does not run at all, preserving the past with all its material manifestations in a piece of amber, as a Nabokovian moth, which may be a more striking discovery for a returnee than a
failure to recognize or to relate to anything at all. What Andaluna Borcila takes
issue with as an Orientalist example of othering is, to my mind, a discursive
coincidence of an exiles personal fiction of the lost home with western rhetorical configurations of Other Europe. These configurations, also imagine
the region as frozen in time, incomprehensible, murky, and innocent,
i. e., not unlike the way it stays arrested in an exile imagination that fails to
grapple with the irreversibility of time and the changes wrought by it upon the
original home.
What role returning exiles have played before and after the changeover in
the construction and dissemination of images of Eastern Europe is a fascinating subject in and of itself, which would require an extensive comparative
reading of the vast corpus of travel writing, political essays, and journalism
written in and of the region during the past two decades. The authors include
Robert Kaplan, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Timothy Garton Ash, Anne
Applebaum, and Omry Ronen to name only a few. Borcila is certainly right to
point out particular patterns in the way that Eastern Europe is typically conceived of in the West. However, the entanglements between the autochthonous and imported articulations of the fiction and reality of East-Central Europe seem to go beyond the simple dichotomy of subjugation and inequality.
Tropes and ideas travel across borders and texts; they are not merely imposed
by the othering West, but also produced locally, inspired by the actualities
of life in the region. Besides, Hoffman is writing in English for a western audience, which inevitably compels her to pull into the text cultural meanings and
codes that her readership can locate and interpret.
Andrei Codrescus travelogue-cum-memoir The Hole in the Flag, also
written in English, reveals the same tension between voices that speak differently to outsiders and to those intimately familiar with the realities of socialist Romania. Readers must then piece together and interpret these voices
into a coherent cultural and political text. Neither Codrescu nor Hoffman
entirely succeeds in avoiding the traps of a nostalgic romantization of Eastern Europe and of western stereotypes and mythologies. What marks off
453
their accounts from the countless contemporary reports about the New
Europe, is the authors awareness of their dual cultural allegiance and the bifurcated observing consciousness that this awareness produces. Both Codrescu and Hoffman alternate between first-person plural (i.e., us, the West)
and first person singular, acting out their multiple identities as American journalists, emigrants, and English-language authors. As a naturalized American,
Hoffman, for instance, feels a sense of loss from the part of me that has
become Western at the disappearance of a myth that Philip Roth famously
termed the Other Europe, but she immediately catches herself registering
a touch of anger from the other side (Exit 209). The exilic identity, played
out rhetorically through the incessant shifting of discursive registers in the
text, reveals itself to be essentially an identity of difference from both sides.
Of course, there is for Codrescu, as well as for Hoffman, an additional
and richer source of alienation their Jewishness (The Hole 164). In a Romanian interview Codrescu confesses that the feeling came very early: [M]y
sense of being different [has] accompanied me since the day I was born. I am
a Jew, so I was different in Romania before ever being different in the States
(qtd. in Marin 90). Whereas Jewishness offers for Suleiman an important
qualifier to her relationship to Hungary, Codrescus Transylvanian-Jewish
roots do not at first seem to disturb his identification with Romanian language
and culture. Codrescu refers to Jewishness in his memoir each time he reflects on the perseverance of anti-Semitism and the post-1989 rise of nationalism and xenophobia, which target him both as a Jew and as an migr-renegade. Characteristically, Codrescus otherness is thrust upon him every
time he is most comfortable with the illusion of being an insider, a native son.
During his second visit to the country, in July 1990, Codrescu attends a twenty-fifth high school reunion that becomes a bleak travesty of all his earlier
fantasies of return. In the aftermath of the interethnic riots in Trgu Mures
and the miners ruthless suppression of the May demonstrations, the second
journey to Romania and the school reunion take place in a radically different
political and emotional climate. As the euphoria of his first visit gives way to
the shock and disappointment at the violent politics of the National Salvation Front, Codrescu admits that he has been rather uncritical in his earlier
idealism and trust in the televised representation of the December events.
As a culmination of the travelogue, the school reunion highlights the authors manifold identity, for Codrescu attends it both in his capacity of a steelygazed observer journalist and as a hopeful, sentimental friend eager to recapture the past (The Hole 226). By the end of the meeting, the American
journalist in him could rejoice at the wealth of the material to report on the
murky depths and the deeply troubled soul of Romania, while the exiled
454
Romanian poet recoils, for alienation and bewilderment darken his cherished
memories of youth. Instead of unchanged friends, to whom he was earlier
prepared to forgive whatever they had done to survive under the long dictatorship (17), he finds himself surrounded by supporters of the National Salvation Front and by specters of the missing others, the Germans and the
Jews who have emigrated [] the ones who were sent to prison for trying to
escape, the ones who faded away, unable to pay the system as well as my
friends here (230). The childhood feeling of his own difference painfully returns: I felt suddenly remote in time and place, no more remote, perhaps
than I once felt back in high school, where I was also a minority: a poet, a Jew
(230).
A new fissure appears next to temporal and spatial dislocations; his former
schoolmates are separated from him not only by language but now also in
terms of politics:
My whole adult life had taken place in America in the American language. My Romanian
was frozen in that eighteen-year-old curl of existential and sexual melancholy smoke at
Marishkas caf. I barely got their jokes, and I was no doubt missing all the subtleties,
where the real story was. Here came another revelation, just as eerie if not eerier than the
rest: I was missing the story! [] But there was also hardly any way I could have made
them see my story, the ecstatic madness of an Americans poets life lived in several cities
on the coasts of different oceans, a life, I might add, in complete sympathy with rebellious students of all causes. (232)
The literal homecoming brings a moment of epiphany, a painful realization of

his outsider position and inability to translate himself backwards to his
former classmates. The bewilderment only deepens the next evening, when
he invites his high school friends for dinner:
They hired a singer and panpiper for the occasion [] a man who looked me directly in
the eye and [] asked me why I had left home, my mother country, my hearth. Just as I
began to wonder myself, awash as I was in sentiment and brandy, the tenor of his songs
changed. He began to sing nationalist Transylvanian songs, and the whole table joined
in. The Hungarians, Germans, Jews, and even people from Bucharest cringed at their
tables. Songs forbidden during Ceausescus era, Fascist Iron Guard anthems poured out,
directed against foreigners, of which clearly I was one through forgiven for the moment and against migrs, and I was forgiven for that, too. (234)
The episode is an almost grotesque assault against illusions of belonging that

the visiting poet could have entertained, an assault against his memories of
the past and the ideals of his rebellious youth the very stuff of his Romanian
identity. Codrescus attempt at balancing identities and allegiances is rendered
impossible once he is denied a Romanian identity. Several days after the reunion Codrescu admits he is happy to return to America, and his desire to
leave the country is reconfirmed by the intimidating treatment by the Roman-
455
ian police at the airport check-in: their rudeness brings back the elation and
fear that he felt when first leaving the country in 1965. Yet his flight is canceled, and the return is postponed. Codrescu has to take the cab back to the
city and witness crowds of students protesting the abuses of the new regime.
He joins the demonstrations, not as a reporter or as an old supporter but as
somebody who can identify with the cause and the spirit of the demonstrators, himself a member of the 68 generation. There is hope still he affirms,
and with hope comes a new locus for identification not with the former
friends of his own generation, who now seem so much older because, having
swapped political sides, then oppose the cause upheld by the young, but with
these students that carry on the protest ethos of his youth (238).
Codrescus account might seem to illustrate perfectly the dangers of living
out ones nostalgic fantasies. By the end of his stay in Romania, when the
dream of both the glorious return and the Revolution he came to witness fade,
just as Salman Rushdie had warned, the journey of return begins to make
sense within the context of his larger journey: emigration. Its essence: an incessant oscillation between two different cultural, rhetorical, and linguistic
frames; a fundamental discontinuity of exilic identity that an exile cannot fully
overcome, least of all by an act of homecoming. By interrogating the relationship between the concepts of home and homeland, Codrescu reaffirms his
cultural identity as a mobile, transferable entity that can be dislocated from
the place of his original homeland (Lomsky-Feder and Rapoport). The very
act of his departure from Romania at the end of his visit defies, then, the redemptive closure of a romantic exiles return. Codrescu affirms the preeminence of his American voice: my whole life has taken place in America in the
American language (232).
Hoffmans journey, too, ends in a clearly dominant voice: that of an American journalist. Although the returning migr/exile can maintain his or her
split identity during the journey and through the narrative medley of autobiography and travelogue, the very fact of departure asks for an explanation. To
all of the authors I discuss here, homecoming confirms their own strangeness
to the original home, thereby destabilizing one of the split parts of their identities and alerting them to the perils of such intercultural travel into time and
space. Recalling Gustav Aschenbach and his attraction to the Polish otherness of Tadzio in Thomas Manns Death in Venice, Hoffman concludes:
to travel toward Otherness, even if it is most ardently desired, is to risk disintegration; it
is to lose the firm certainties of yourself. Not at all coincidentally, Manns parable could be read
as a cautionary tale about the dangers of travel. It is the figure of a traveler, ambiguous,
slightly sinister, and evocative of primal jungle imagery that beckons Aschenbach toward
his glorious misadventure. Perhaps, I should take warning; except of course, Manns
456
Otherness is, in some degree, my notion of home; and in my travels for all their hardships, I am pursuing the essence of the familiar through that too, after long separation,
can become oddly elusive. (Exit 78) (emphasis KP)
Four decades after my first exile, the current one has the advantage that it allows no fantasies about return. The witnesses of my life are now scattered to all corners and cemeteries of the world. (Manea 217)
Norman Maneas memoir is perhaps, the most internally complex of all the
ones discussed here. It is also the only one written in the exiles native tongue.
Structurally, it negotiates between the genres and narrative strategies employed by each of the other three authors, mixing political and poetic commentary, personal memoir, travelogue, diary, philosophical reflection, and
well-positioned quotations, to chart Maneas own exilic trajectory and to
wrestle the concept of exile and his own exile from the straightjacket of
stereotypes (295). Not unlike Hoffmans autobiography, that of Maneas is
staked out by the marked tensions between an intellectual understanding of
his condition and the intimate experience of pain and dispossession that he
estranges by admitting a plethora of voices into his narrative, as if hoping
that the rhetorical hysteria of other peoples words could release him from
himself (295).
Acutely sensitive to cultural and political clichs, as well as to the fallacies of
retrospective nostalgia, Manea declares himself to be an embarrassed inhabitant of his own biography, refusing to submit to both the boring sound of
Eastern European self-pity and to the western variety of popular tell-all
confessions and self-revelations of group therapy, in other words to the
identity of a victim:
Outer adversities? I had received my initiation into such banalities at a very early age. As
for the hostile campaigns of more recent years, when one is under siege, it is not easy to
avoid narcissistic suspicions, or pathetic masochism. Again a victim? The idea exasperated me, I must admit. [] But the mask was now glued to my face the classic public
enemy, the Other. I had always been an other, consciously or not, unmasked or not,
even when I could not identify with my mothers ghetto or any other ghetto of identity.
Outer adversities can overlap with inner adversities and the fatigue of being oneself.
(1819; emphasis KP)
To subvert the logic and rhetorical power of the masks glued to the face,
Manea devises a narrative at once oblique and blunt, highly allegorical and
mercilessly historical, which constantly refocuses his lens, moving between
personal recollections, national history, family past, and reflections on Romanias cultural and intellectual scene. The authorial voice is similarly frag-
457
mented and self-effacing. Manea moves from the first-person singular to second and third-person evocations and back, while densely saturating his
self-ironic and ambivalent discourse with quotations, literary echoes, and
paraphrases from Kafka and Blanchot to Heiddeger, Mihail Sebastian, Cioran, Celan, Kierkegaard and unavoidably Derrida. In place of straightforward recollections and the documentary premise typical of most memoirs,
Manea self-consciously blurs the boundaries between memory and literature,
recollection and fiction, alluding rather than describing, so that the narrator
himself dissolves into fiction. His fatigue of being oneself, fatigue of belongings, spurs forward an array of other voices, transient characters (Nicu
Steinhardt, the poet Mugur, etc.), and allegorical names. Just as his friends
come into the narrative in the disguise of elaborate nicknames e.g. HalfMan-Riding, Half-One-Legged-Hare, the Flying Elephant, Golden Brain,
Donna Alba, the exile writer never discloses himself completely either,
never quite inhabits the one and only name. For instance, during his clandestine romance with the Gentile Juliette, disliked by his controlling mother, the
protagonist is referred to as Romeo. The cramped cattle trains conveying
the deported family to the concentration camps of Transnistria unlikely arks
promising destruction rather than survival give a cruelly ironic twist to Normans Hebrew name, Noah. The communist regime had variously labeled
him a dwarf from Jerusalem, a traitor, an American agent, extraterritorial
and cosmopolitan. In post-communist Romania he was attacked by the new
nationalists, who called for the extermination of the moth. He is Leopold
Bloom, an emblem of restlessness and uprootedness, also Joyces new Ulysses
(Chapter 14, Bloomsday).
Finally, as the title suggests, he is a returning hooligan, a reference to Mircea Eliades novel The Hooligans (1935). Eliades hooliganism was a togetherness in death and a rebellion unto death, of perfectly and evenly aligned
regiments intoxicated by a collective myth, acted out by the Romanian fascist
Iron Guard. The 1991 publication of Maneas article about Eliades Legionnaire sympathies in The New Republic coincided with the murder of professor
and writer Ioan Petru Culianu at the University of Chicago, a former disciple
of Eliades. Maneas article unleashed a heated controversy in the Romanian
press, so that his arrival at the cusp of the ongoing public debate over the legacy of the interwar period was indeed an act of hooliganism in the American
sense: troublemaking (70). However, it is another famous troublemaker
that he most closely identifies with: the Jewish-Romanian writer Mihail Sebastian ( Joseph Hechter), who published in 1935 a booklet with the telling title
How I Became a Hooligan? His Journal was published in the spring of 1997, at the
time of Maneas visit to Bucharest, and further fueled public debate over the
458
legacy of the interwar period. Sebastians best-known novel, Two Thousand

Years, caused a scandal in 1934 when it came out with a preface written by Sebastians mentor in the literary group Criterion, the Iron Guard philosopher Nae
Ionescu. Ionescus blatantly nationalistic rhetoric, unmistakably directed
against Sebastians Jewishness, has turned Sebastian into a pariah for both his
Jewish friends and for the sympathizers of the ultra-nationalist right-wing.
Rootless, exiled, and a dissident the archetypal Jewish hooligan (24),
Hechter/Sebastian is Maneas answer to the haunting question of a Chinese
sage: What did you look like before your father and mother met?: [I]n
1935, the year before I was born, I was the hooligan Sebastian and so I
would be fifty years after and then ten more years after that and another
ten years and all the years between (76). Hooliganism was also a charge common to most communist regimes, leveled against dissident intellectuals and
culture-makers, especially those not employed productively and leading a
parasitic life. In a sad parody of Sebastians story, Manea was not only attacked by the communist authorities but also shunned by the officials of the
Jewish community following his public declarations against official nationalism and anti-Semitism in 1982 (266).
Perhaps the most important of these many appellations and literary Doppelgngers through whom Manea focalizes his account is the circus clown Augustus the Fool, an import from Maneas earlier writings, the 1979 book The
Years of Apprenticeship of Augustus the Fool and the 1992 collection of essays On
Clowns: The Dictator and the Artist. Augustus the Fool, the writers foil, is a
bungler ill equipped for everyday life, who comes up against the White
Clown, the tyrant, the representative of power and authority (2021). Augustus the Fool is also a quintessential nomadic, exilic figure, the pariah, the
loser, the one who always gets kicked in the ass, to the audiences delight, and
whose sarcasm is turned on himself rather than others (253). The country
that Augustus the Fool is about to revisit, his Eastern European circus, also
gets another name: Romania, whose language and literature he truly inhabits,
is engulfed by the terrifying Jormania of Ioan Petru Culianus short stories,
a domain of lies, demagoguery, corruption, a banana-style democracy of
pornography and execution squads (14).
Re-membering, as the exiled writers are well aware, does not promise a
complete recuperation of the previous self, but rather a painful process of
piecing together the past and the present in ways that confer meaning on the
life story. Narrative is essential to the process of remembering, it seeks to
remedy its lacunas by forging a continuous self and a consistent consciousness. It imparts coherence and integrity on the personal history interrupted or
compromised by traumas and losses incurred by dislocation, establishes
459
cause-effect connections between the past and the present that could have
not been there, straightens out ambiguities and smuggles in a moralizing plot.
Thereby the controlled linearity of an articulated (narrated) memory forgets as much as it evokes, redressing the past in accordance with the exigencies of the present (King; Seyhan; Brooks, etc.).
Post-structuralist analyses of narration, emplotment, the constructedness
of subjectivity, and other formal elements of representation have produced a
large body literature on the artifice of articulated memory and the invention
of the self in autobiographical writing, and Manea is certainly well aware of
these critical deconstructions. In order to transmute an existential fragmentation into a textual composition, Manea seizes on the euphemerality and instability of memory as a powerful metaphor. His text structurally assumes the
shape of a memory-stream that lurches back and forth in a temporality of its
own, strewn with sinkholes and whirlpools of constant revision that bubble
up images and visions of the past. To foreground the fallacy of seamless
straight narration, this autobiographical writing breaks the plot with flashbacks, repetitions, and inter-textual references that are unpredictable, and
often incoherent. Self-narratives that consciously yield to the idiom of memory by imitating its dream-like fluid form lack the closure and the certainty of
the more conventional modes of autobiographical writing, but they do gain
what Eva Hoffman calls a breathing space or a space of borderless possibility that only dreams have the space where past can be redressed, reassembled anew from its shimmering fragments (Lost in Translation 280).
The complex chronotope of the narrative and the polyphony of the authorial voices are engendered by and matched with Maneas troubling subject:
the essential ambiguity of belonging and fixed identity. He is as suspicious of
the traps of the pretentious home called the motherland as he is apprehensive of the perils of uprootedness (Manea 363). The ghetto of identity
from which Manea seeks to escape encompasses his family, national, ethnic,
and ideological affiliations i.e. his early flirtation with Communism, his Jewishness, his mothers tyranny of affections (her claw), and the patriotism
expected of him. Belonging spells certitude, and Manea regards these as suspect, even when he is the one who utters them. Instead, he continuously
speaks about ambiguity: the ambiguities of the labor camp, of the Communist
penal colony, and of exile refuse exclusive definitions by a collective destiny
and claims by the clans of either victims or victimizers (247). Being excluded is the only dignity we have, the exiled Cioran has repeatedly said (48).
Jewishness is certainly the most ambiguous of all identities that Manea
examines in his book. Growing up in the traditional Jewish milieu of a small
town in Bukovina, a restricted world trapped by its own fears and frus-
460
trations, and suffering from the disease of its past, Manea, like many in his
generation, embraces the ideology of communism that holds a promise of
combating with its ethos of internationalism both the decease of the ghetto
and anti-Semitism. The new socialist rituals that Manea undergoes as a young
pioneer are farcical evocations of the ritual practices of traditional Judaism
that he had abandoned. At the age of thirteen, for instance, he is baptized in
the pioneer organization instead of being properly bar-mitzvahd. To mourn
the death of Stalin, he puts an armband on his left hand at the very place
where observant Jews wind their phylacteries (153). In the late 1950s, when
the Romanian Jews begin to emigrate to Israel en masse, Manea registers a feeling of relief for being freed from their proximity, for no longer being associated with them (146, 153, 167):
Most of the family were to follow, taking with them their ancient names Rebecca,
Aron, Rachel, Ruth, David, Esther, Sarah, Eliezer, Moshe names that had wandered
for hundreds of years through foreign lands and among foreign peoples and tongues,
now returning to the place and language where they thought they belonged. The echo of
those names would gradually fade and with them their famed qualities their mercantile
spirit and group solidarity, their anxiety and tenacity, their mysticism and realism, their
passion and lucidity. Where did I fit in among all these stereotypes? [] I no longer felt
at ease among the names and reputations of my fellow clansmen, nor did I feel bound by
the fluctuations of their nomadic destiny. Had I become alienated from those among
whom I had been reborn ten years earlier? (187).
What could all too easily be dismissed as a typical case of proverbial Jewish
self-hatred, is certainly more complex. As a concentration-camp survivor,
Manea keeps repeating to himself Kafkas famous remark, what have I got to
do with the Jews? I have got hardly anything in common with myself, but he
realizes that this does not sound all that convincing after the horrors of the
Holocaust and in view of Romanias history of violent anti-Semitism. Pondering Freuds famous question, What remains Jewish in a Jew who is neither religious nor a nationalist and who is ignorant of the Bibles tongue, Manea, his
own most ruthless analyst, replies as Freud did: Much (241):
At the age of five, in Transnistria, the little Jew was known as Noah, not Norman. At the
age of fifty, on the eve of the new exile, the relation between self and Jew had become a
complicated knot, one that could not fail to interest Dr. Freud. The psychoanalyst
should be asked, finally, to answer not only the question he himself has asked but also the
question posed by posterity: not necessarily what is left after you have lost what you did
not possess, but how you become a Jew after the Holocaust, after Communism and exile.
Are these, by definition, essentially Jewish traumas? Are these initiations carved in your
soul, not only your body, that make you a Jew when you are not one? (242)
For Manea, his 1941 deportation was an Initiation into Exile, and also an
initiation into Jewish collective destiny, but he bridles against this ascribed
461
shared identity, refusing to be a mere sum of collective catastrophes, an

eternal victim who peddles his suffering publicly (246). Ethnicity, he argues,
is a strictly private matter, and he protests the unceremonius inclusion of his
name in the 1982 anthology of Romanian Jewish writers. The weight of history, of shared suffering, persistent xenophobia, and a gamut of myths and
cultural clichs associated with it make Jewishness, in Maneas eyes, a form of
belonging from which it is especially difficult to get unstuck and impossible to be indifferent to. However, he refuses the abstract parentheses of
Lyotards non-Jewish Jew, preferring, instead, Hechter/Sebastians formulation that calls on the alienated Jewish writer to be with his fellow believers
when difficult times strike, and warns him of the ensuing disappointment a
delicate balancing act of walking away from ones kin yet still claiming kinship
(70, 341).
Evasiveness is Maneas ultimate refuge, the modality of his autobiographical voice. But evasiveness has a flip side: hypocrisy. The Romanian language,
the fluid shelter and true home, the promise of real citizenship and real belonging, the protective and isolating snails shell that an exiled writer carries with him into exile, offers the writer an idiom that could be both elusive
and contaminated by a communist doublespeak:
Reading between the lines became the normal practice [] it was a language of encoded
terminology, charades, a restricted monotonous language that only served to undermine
peoples confidence in words, encouraging their suspicion of words. [] The slogans,
the clichs, the threats, the duplicity, the conventions, the lies big and small, smooth and
rough, colored and colorless, odorless, insipid lies, everywhere, in the streets, at home.
(15556, 160)
Despite Maneas early interest in literature, he chooses to study hydraulic engineering, so as not to be implicated in the ubiquitous single Party language.
His first work of fiction, tellingly called The Story of the Word, was published only in 1966. Much of Maneas subsequent writing came under sharp
critique from the Party, particularly the last novel that he had published in
Romania in 1986, The Black Envelope. Maneas decision to leave the country,
which then meant permanent exclusion, is literally a transition from the monotonous language of lies to the language of evasiveness and self-doubt. Was it
successful? Are exiles ever entirely free to devise a personal idiom uninfected
by the traces of their earlier belongings? And is language not too fluid and untrustworthy a shelter to begin with? It is not accidental, perhaps, that one of
the first disappointments of the writers return to Bucharest, a harbinger of
the many disappointments-to-come, is the post-communist Romanian parlance that has recycled all the old clichs of the socialist wooden tongue with
injections of jargon deriving from American movies and advertising (275).
462
Exile offers the advantage of contemplating the meaning of ones belonging from a distance, though Manea is quick to assert that no one can ever
claim they are far enough from themselves (314). Paradoxically, return helps
to gain distance and indifference to the past.
Like Hoffmans Lost in Translation, Maneas book opens with a scene in Paradise. However, it involves a stage set of his afterlife, a dream-like cityscape
of the exiles destination, New York, rather than luminous memories of a
European childhood (4). The sheer profusion of colors, scents, faces, objects,
and languages around him, none irreplaceable, summons up the image of
some celestial realm in which the exile can even encounter the shadow of his
dead mother and follow her up Amsterdam Avenue (45).
Articulations of exile as life after death and a second re-birth (the first
was his liberation from the camp) dominate Maneas intonation when describing his homecoming. Return is a voyage into an afterlife (postmortem
tourism as Manea calls it) and the homecomer is more of a ghost, a panoply
of masks and names obliquely referring to his former selves (277). Early in the
text Manea defines himself as a survivor, a term, as Katarzyna Jerzak convincingly argues, that points beyond his experience of Transnistrian concentration camps and the communist dictatorship to the existential condition of
living above, beyond, on the surface of life. The term comes from the Latin supervivere: to survive is to be beyond life, next to life, but not in it ( Jerzak 12). Hoffman describes the train that carried her family from Montreal to their new
home in Vancouver as giant scissors cutting a three-thousand-mile rip
through her life, which was from then on forever divided into two parts (Lost
100). For Manea, the cuts and ruptures are even more complex, marked off
with capital letters to emphasize the myth-making potential of the different
stages: his Initiation into Exile with the familys 1941 deportation to Transnistria; his 1945 Return from the camps; his 1947 unsuccessful Departure
from Romania; and his final Escape in 1988. The Hooligans Return charts not
just Maneas visit to Romania a decade after his emigration, but weaves the
three journeys together, shifting time and space from Manhattan to Bucharest, from Suceava to Ataki, from Tirgu Frumos to Cluj, crossing the border
back and forth between Jormania and Romania. The wheels of the train
that carries him to Cluj in 1997 beat out the same rhythm as the wheels of the
packed freight car that carried him to the camps in 1941 and of another train
that brought him back in 1945. Nightmare and feverish reality, past and present, all melt into a fluidum in which they are impossible to tell apart.
Death has prevented Culianu from returning to Romania and Sebastian
from leaving it. With me, death, that nymphomaniac, had adopted a different
463
game: she offered me the privilege of a voyage to my own posterity

(Manea 18). The themes of death and rebirth first enter the narrative when
Manea speaks about his return from the camp: he crossed the Styx returning
to the Eden of his native land, which was soon to become a Kafkaesque
penal colony He re-crossed the Styx of Atlantics again in 1997, only this
time the crossing is a parody of the earlier Return and the aura of survival that
surround [the writer] is now a prop in the more recent dramas staged by memory (245). Maneas frequent resort to terms like setting, stage set, circus, and farce, accentuate the theatricality and, perhaps, impossibility of
an exiles return from the dead. In contrast, his war time experiences are
marked off with capital letters: e.g. Initiation into Exile, Return, Departure, as
if to safeguard them from the relativist parentheses, postmodernist deconstructions, and the parody of symmetrical repetitions.
In an ultimate act of inversion, Manea comes back to Romania on the eve
of Passover, the Jewish holiday celebrating exodus from Egyptian slavery. It
takes a while before he finds the place where the seder is held the streets are
renamed, some roads are demolished to make way for new constructions, and
the usual marker of such gatherings in the socialist times, the ever present police cordons in front of Jewish restaurants, are now gone. Inversing the traditional four questions asked by the youngest child present at the seder, Ma nishtana ha-laila ha-ze?, Maneas former self asks:
Wherefore is this night different from all other nights, my former self asks. Age has
plastered new masks on the faces of yesteryear. At the present gathering I cannot detect
the former air of festive duplicity, the quarter-truths, wrapped in puzzling hints and gestures, as required by the secret code of the time, equally, by attempts to undermine it.
[] The atmosphere of the year 5757 lacks the former air of excitement and risk it had in
the time of slavery, complicity, and evasion. All that is left is a sleepy assembly of apathetic survivors, gathered to join in the ancient recital (267).
Everything is the same, yet not quite the same. It lacks the former color,
solidity, seriousness, and passion, as if a result of a double exposure, in which
the dream-like images generated by exilic memory were superimposed on
reality to burn the film: The facades look dirty, the pedestrians rigid, diminished, ghost-like. The atmosphere is alien, I am alien, the pedestrians alien
(263). Manea revisits the former houses of his relatives, now dead, only to
realize that his presence has been similarly wiped from the scene:
Something indefinable but essential has skewed the stage set, something akin to an invisible cataclysm, a magnetic anomaly, the aftermath of an internal hemorrhage. [] Death
has passed this way, in the footsteps of the dead man now revisiting the landscape of his
life, in which he can no longer find a place or a sign of himself. After my death, death
visited this place, but was it not already here, was it not that from which I had fled? (26364)
464
Fleeing from the tyranny of the past and its imposed identities, Manea sought
to find in America an impersonal, anonymous home, a hospitable, democratic and indifferent homeland (244). The return confronts him with the
former homeland, which was indifferent all right, but neither hospitable nor
democratic. Her indifference too, is hard-won. Maneas article on Eliades
right-wing politics and the 1997 publication of Sebastians Journal have provoked the ire of Bucharests intellectuals to the extent that anticipating yet
more abuse and slander from his former countrymen Manea can read the future in the past by recalling the insults leveled at Sebastian in the 1930s: Augustus the Fool has come back for more! Augustus the Fool will write about
that hooligan Sebastians Journal and will, once more, become a hooligan himself (338)!
As his brief twelve-day visit draws to an end, Manea opens his notebook
that he took with him in order to jot down his impressions. The first pages are
covered with quotations from Levinas, Arendt, Celan, and Derrida, words by
others that Manea hoped would prepare him for the trip. When he sits down
to write in his own voice, a stream of unanswerable questions pours onto the
pages:
Was my journey irrelevant? Did this very irrelevancy justify it? Were the past and future
only good-humored winks of the great void? Is our biography located within ourselves
and nowhere else? Is the nomadic motherland also within ourselves? Had I freed myself
from the burden of trying to be something, anything? Was I finally free? (382)
The answers offer themselves promptly: the need to accept fate, the permanence of passage, the impossibility of repeating or redeeming anything. And
something else still, the consolation of being sheltered by ones language,
however hybrid it has become in exile: August the Fool could have experienced such revelations without ever submitting to the parodies of return, he
quips, but he consents that it took a postmortem tour of return to accept
the exilic afterlife as the only homeland available for the uprooted and dispossessed, and America as the best route of transit.
The exile takes his flight back, a flight from nowhere to nowhere. Upon
arrival he realizes that the blue book containing all his impressions, the only
proof that his voyage to posterity has indeed taken place, is gone, lost, and
would not allow [itself] to be found. In a sense, the infinitely more polyphonic and rich Hooligans Return is Maneas reconstruction of the lost blue
notebook, which is still unable to provide firm answers to the unanswerable
questions of exile. But at least he now knows where the blue book should be
sent in case it is miraculously found: Home, to my home address, in New
York, of course, the Upper West Side, in Manhattan (385).
465
Oz finally became home: the imagined world became the actual world [] because [] once we have left our childhood
places [] armed with what we have and are, we understand
that the real secret of the rubber slippers is not that there is
no place like home, but rather that there is no longer such a
place as home: except, of course, for the homes we make or
the homes that are made for us in Oz: which is anywhere, and
everywhere, except the place from which we began. (Rushdie, The Wizard of Oz 57)
In the grip of the desire to identify with the writers of exilic discourse it is all
too easy to overlook its constructedness and subjectivity. This is not to say
that the (re)inventions, revisions, and editing inherent in autobiographical
writing diminish the credibility of the exiles accounts or discredit their identity claims. Rather, it is a reminder of the multiple and competing ideological
contexts (political, cultural, philosophical, etc.) that these claims address or
seek to undercut, and the distinct audiences for which the memoirs are
written. Except for Norman Manea, Joseph Brodsky, and Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, who were forced to leave their countries, the authors discussed above
had left voluntarily or had been taken along by their emigrating parents i.e.
they were not exiles in the strict sense of the term used elsewhere in this collection. Should that mean that their accounts should be dismissed as inauthentic, belonging to other fields of study? Or which was my contention in
this essay should this rather suggest that the term exile has a broad and
powerful symbolic appeal for those contemplating the deep-seated ruptures
and losses wrought by the twentieth century on the East-Central European
nations, as well as other, more theoretical issues of modern and postmodern
alienation and cultural amnesia? The writers selected for this study all share a
common identity: they are East-Central European Jews, survivors of their
near-exterminated communities. They are exiled from the history and culture
of their people in the region not by physical displacement alone, but also by
the devastations of the Holocaust and the subsequent Soviet suppression,
which had jointly conspired to destroy most traces of once flourishing Jewish
cultures. The perpetuation of exilic consciousnesses and concomitant claims
to identity abundantly reveal why these migrs distrust unproblematic closures and resolutions of their complex life stories. Given the persistent presence of anti-Semitism and xenophobia in the former socialist countries, exilic
identity offers an escape from the strictures and ideological pressures of the
post-1989 Eastern European political and cultural discourses. It is also a way
to keep a distance and maintain ones skepticism and non-partisanship vis-vis the Old Country, a skepticism, we should add, that frequently camou-
466
flages an exiles orientalizing posturing. In other words, exilic identities can be

produced beyond the departure, by the circumstances of return, of which
much is left untold or edited out even by the most scrupulous of writers. The
reception of the very memoir by the domestic audience, the fate of the entire
literary or creative oeuvre within the domestic literary or academic post-1989
canon, the political discourse accompanying the migrs visit, and much
more all these affect the self-perception of the homecomer and ultimately
fix the distance between the exilic home and the old country.
Thus, it seems that those willing to embark on a trip back and narrate the
story of this journey have no choice but to engage the spacious elasticity and
relativity of the textual, discursive exile as it functions in the autobiographies
examined here. In his Fictions in Autobiography, Paul John Eakin emphasizes the
heightened self-consciousness of autobiographical writers by comparing
their practice to a second acquisition of language, a second coming into
being of self, a self-conscious self-consciousness (9). The autobiographical
writings of exiled intellectuals and culture-makers embody this self-conscious self-consciousness most poignantly, since the rebirths and language
acquisitions that they speak of are not mere metaphors. As my narratives of
homecoming vividly show, the heightened self-awareness of the authors, their
observing consciousness, works against forces of oblivion and the blandishments of nostalgic retrospection, the tyranny of belonging and the anguish
of uprootedeness that are the exiles ongoing lot.
Self-narratives, then, are essentially instruments of self-(re)invention, but
they are also inherently therapeutic: in addition to reconciling the authors to
what has been lost (and gained) in translating their pre-exilic self into an exile
consciousness, they prompt the exile to confront and to contemplate the inescapable otherness within, the conflation of inner and outer adversities wrought
by the spatial and temporal dislocations and discontinuities of the exilic condition. In Strangers to Ourselves, Julia Kristeva argues that the only way to escape the
hatred and burden of this essential strangeness is not through a leveling and
forgetting but through the harmonious repetition of the differences it implies
and spreads (103). Return and its narrativizing, as Eva Hoffman, Susan Suleiman, Andrei Codrescu and Norman Manea have discovered, are means of confronting and re-presenting ones past in order to comprehend ones distance
from it. As Eva Hoffman concluded at the end of her memoir:
As every writer knows, it is only when you come to a certain point in your manuscript
that it becomes clear how the beginning should go, and what importance it has within
the whole. And its usually after revisiting backward from the middle that one can begin
to go on with the rest. To some extent, one has to rewrite the past in order to understand
it. I have to see Cracow in the dimensions it has in my adult eye in order to perceive that
467
my story has been only a story []. It is the price of emigration, as of any radical discontinuity, that it makes such reviews and re-readings difficult; being cut off from one
part of ones story is apt to veil it in the haze of nostalgia, which is an ineffectual relationship to the past, and the haze of alienation, which is an ineffectual relationship to the
present (Lost 24142).
Works Cited
Ascher, Maria Louise The Exile as Autobiographer: Nabokovs Homecoming. Radulescu 6786.
Borcila, Andaluna. How I Found Eastern Europe: Televisual Geography, Travel Sites, and
Museum Installations. Over the Wall/After the Fall: Post-Communist Cultures through an
East-West Gaze. Ed. Sibelan Forrester, Magdalena J. Zaborowska and Elena Gapova.
Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2004. 4264.
Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2002.
Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Oxford: Clarendon P,
1984.
Burstein, Janet Handler. Recalling Home: American Jewish Women Writers of the New
Wave. Contemporary Literature 42.4 (2001): 80024.
Chambers, Iain. Migrancy, Culture, Identity. London: Routledge, 1994.
Codrescu, Andrei. The Hole in the Flag: A Romanian Exiles Story of His Return and Revolution.
New York: Morrow, 1991.
DeKoven Ezrahi, Sidra. Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination.
Berkeley: U of California P, 2000.
Drakulic, Slavenka. On the Quality of Wall Paint in Eastern Europe. How We Survived
Communism and Even Laughed. London: Vintage, 1987.
Eakin, Paul John. Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988.
Friederich, Paul. Binarism versus Synthesis: Eastern European and Generic Exile. Radulescu 15985.
Graffy, Julian. migr Experience of the West as related by Soviet Journals. Under Eastern
Eyes: The West as Reflected in Recent migr Writing. Ed. Arnold McMillin. London: McMillan with SEES U of London, 1991. 11557.
Hoffman, Eva. Exit into History. A Journey Through the New Eastern Europe. New York; Viking,
1993.
Hoffman, Eva. Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language. London: Vintage, 1998.
Hoffman, Eva. After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust. New York:
Public Affairs, 2004.
Jerzak, Katarzyna. Exile as Life After Death in the Writings of Henryk Grynberg and Norman Manea. The Writer Uprooted: Contemporary Jewish Exile Literature in America. Ed. Alvin
Rosenfeld. Bloomington: Indiana UP, forthcoming.
Kaplan, Caren. Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement. Durham: Duke UP,
1996.
King, Nicola. Memory, Narrative, Identity: Remembering the Self. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP,
2000.
Klosty Beaujour, Elizabeth. Alien Tongues: Bilingual Russian Writers of the First Emigration.
Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989.
468
Kreisler Harry, Between Memory and History: A Writers Voice: Conversation with Eva
Hoffman, author. October 5, 2000) Available at http://globetrotter.berkley.edu/
people/Hoffman/hoffman-con1.html
Kristeva, Julia. Strangers to Ourselves. Trans. Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP,
1991.
Lupton, Catherine. The Exile of Remembering: Movement and Memory in Chris Markers
San Soleil. Cultures of Exile: Images of Displacement. Ed. Wendy Everett and Peter Wagstaff. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2004. 3348.
Lomsky-Feder, Edna and Tamar Rapoport. Seeking a Place to Rest: Representation of
Bounded Movement among Russian-Jewish Homecomers. Ethos 30.3 (September
2002): 22748.
Manea, Norman. The Hooligans Return: A Memoir. [ntoarcerea huliganului] Trans. Angela Jianu.
New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2003.
Marin, Noemi. The Rhetoric of Andrei Codrescu: A Reading in Exilic Fragmentation.
Radulescu 87106.
McCarthy, Mary. A Guide to Exiles, Expatriates, and Internal Emigrs. Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile. Ed. Marc Robinson. Boston and London: Faber and Faber, 1994.
4958.
Naficy, Hamid. Framing Exile: From Homeland to Homepage. Home, Exile, Homeland:
Film, Media, and the Politics of Place. Ed. Hamid Naficy. New York: Routledge/AFI Film
Readers, 1999. 113.
Nora, Pierre. Between Memory and History: Les lieux de mmoire. Representations Special
issue: Memory and Counter-Memory 26 (Spring 1989): 725.
Peters, John Durham. Exile, Nomadism and Diaspora: The Stakes of Mobility in Western
Canon. Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place. Ed. Hamid Naficy.
London and New York: Routledge/AFI Film Readers, 1999. 1737.
Proefriedt, William. The Education of Eva Hoffman. Journal of Ethnic Studies 18:4 (1990):
12334.
Radulescu, Domnica, ed. Realms of Exile: Nomadism, Diasporas, and Eastern Voices. Lanham,
MD: Lexington Books, 2002.
Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 19811991. New York: Penguin,
1991.
Rushdie, Salman.A Dream of Glorious Return. Step Across This Line: Collected Non-Fiction,
19922002. New York: Random House, 2002. 180210
Rushdie, Salman. The Wizard of Oz. London: British Film Institute, 1999.
Said, Edward. Reflections on Exile. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard UP, 2000. 17386.
Seyhan, Azade, Writing Outside the Nation. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000.
Siedel, Michael. Exile and the Narrative Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1986.
Steiner, George. Our Homeland, the Text. No Passion Spent: Essays 19781998. New
Haven: Yale UP, 1998. 30427.
Stenberg, Peter. From Skutchno to Prawda or You Cant Go Home Again. Literature and
Politics in Central Europe: Studies in Honor of Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz. Eds. Leslie Miller,
Klaus Petersen, and Karl Zaenker. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1993. 12233.
Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection.
Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1985.
Suleiman, Susan Rubin. Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P,
1996.
469
Suleiman, Susan Rubin. Monuments in a Foreign Tongue: On Reading Holocaust Memoirs by Emigrants. Poetics Today 17.4 (1996): 63957.
Suleiman, Susan Rubin, ed. Exile and Creativity: Signposts, Travelers, Outsiders, Backward Glances.
Durham: Duke UP, 1998.
Suleiman, Susan Ruben. Crises of Memory and the Second World War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
UP, 2006.
Zadworna Fjellestad, Danuta. The Insertion of the Self into the Space of Borderless Possibility: Eva Hoffmans Exiled Body. MELUS 20.2 (1995): 13347.
Zaborowska, Magdalena J. How We Found America: Reading Gender through East European Immigrant Narratives. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1995.
470
Chapter V
The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization,
New Exiles
Introduction
473
Introduction
As in 194445, exiles simultaneously exited and returned during the first half
of the 1990s, except that in the latter case the going and the returning concerned different countries. After 1989, exiled writers or their literary legacy
could return to the East-Central European countries, whereas disintegrating
Yugoslavia sent exiles both abroad and to other newly formed nations of the
former Yugoslav Federation. Furthermore, as Dragan Klaic wittily and convincingly shows, exile has become digitalized by the 1990s, making thus communication infinitely easier with those left behind.
Weighing the transitory, partial, and digital exile of the ex-Yugoslavians
(which did not make the atrocities that forced people into exile more palatable), we may well conclude, after having read the articles of Sndor Hites and
John Neubauer, that the problematics of homecoming have become as disturbing as those of departing. This is a main reason for including homecoming in the overall title of our volume.
What exactly are these problems? Some are familiar to us from earlier
homecomings, especially the post-World War II return of German exile
writers, which released that bitter debate on internal emigration between
Thomas Mann and those at home who claimed that they chose a harder opposition to Hitlers regime than those that had left disloyally and comfortably. In post-war Germany, as in post-1989 Hungary, this led to longer debates about the relative merits of literature written at home and in exile.
However, the post-1989 homecomings in Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia
are special, because they involve the question whether earlier fascists and fascist sympathizers should be rehabilitated. Here, the comparison the
post-1945 homecoming in Hungary is more relevant. Those who returned in
1945 to Hungary were mostly Muscovites, writers who lived through the
war in the Soviet Union. Though their exile experiences in the glorified home
of Socialism had often been devastating and traumatic, most of them returned
optimistically and, weaponed with communist ideology, ready to assume
power at home. Those who returned after 1989 formed a much looser group,
whose members ranged from the democratic center to right wing nationalists.
These latter ones, most of whom fled in 194445, usually participate by
means of their writings rather than personally, in the nationalist revivals of
474
Chapter V: The 1990s: Homecoming, (Re)Canonization, New Exiles
Hungary Slovakia, or Romania. Within fifteen years or so, the writings of

most Arrow-Cross writers, Romanian Legionaries, Slovak followers of Jozef
Tiso, Croatian followers of the Ustase, and Serbian chauvinists have become
available in bookstores and acquired considerable readership. To illustrate
this problem we have included an article on one of the most popular writesr in
Hungary today, Albert Wass, an anti-Semitic and anti-Romanian writer from
Transylvania, who has been condemned to death in absentia by a Romanian
court in 1946. The formal or ideational rehabilitation of writers like him is
today a symptom of rising nationalism and anti-Semitism in the region. Hence
homecoming is, as Ksenia Polouektova convincingly shows, no longer a
simple and joyous reunion, but a divisive and aggressive event, which, we
should add, makes many liberals and democrats in these countries uncomfortable at home. While it would be too pessimistic to envisage another wave
of exodus, one cannot rule out a further shift to the extreme right, especially
under the financial and economic crisis now shaking the world. However, the
situation in Western Europe and North America has now become different,
for the influx of non-European writers, intellectuals, and masses of refugees
have essentially shifted attention away from East-Central Europe. The exile
landscapes of Paris, London, New York, and other Western metropolises are
populated by non-European arrivals. That East-Central Europe is now part
of the European Community may help prevent future waves of exile from the
region, but success is by no means guaranteed. Exile, or some metamorphosed variant of it, continues to haunt the region.
Herta Mller (Thomas Cooper)
475
Herta Mller: Between Myths of Belonging

Thomas Cooper
The work of Herta Mller is arguably paradigmatic of the paradoxes of home

and homeland that are brought into relief through the construction of the
concept of the author in exile. Her ambiguous status as an outsider, in several
senses, raises the question to what extent the notion of the exile, because it
rests on an assertion of exclusion, necessarily lends at least tacit validity to disputed notions of belonging. A writer who published first as a member of a linguistic minority in Romania and later as a recognized novelist and poet in
Germany, Mller deviates from the model of the literary exile exemplified by
Vladimir Nabokov, Czesaw Miosz, or Milan Kundera. Whereas these
writers left the communities of their mother tongues and in some cases chose
to write in a new language, in leaving Romania for Germany Mller left a community in which she was a member of a linguistic minority and entered a state
in which her mother tongue was the common language. She thereby constitutes a counterpoint to the classic model of exile; her case exposes the limitations of the figure of the exile as outsider by reminding us that notions of
belonging are elusive and often lose their consistency on closer scrutiny. Her
ambivalent status as a critic of the conservative community of her birth, an
exile from a country in which as a member of a linguistic minority and a victim
of state persecution she was arguably never at home, and a cultural foreigner
in her adopted country of Germany foregrounds the notion of the author in
exile as a value-laden concept that borrows from and reinforces often competing narratives of belonging. Her work is a reminder that the conception of
exile as a traumatic rupture from a unitary culture is to some extent a narrative
that rests for its force on the construction (and thereby fictionalization) of
this unitary culture, a process that separation enables. It is precisely this fictionalization that Mller refuses. Far from reifying visions of integral cultural
identity, her fiction, collage poetry, and essays subject such visions to continuous interrogation, suggesting a new understanding of the location of exile not
as a space outside but as a space between. Indeed her refusal to participate in
the construction of a static identity suggests a reconsideration of the nationalist and gendered connotations of exile, inviting us to reconceptualize the lit-
476
erature of displacement not as an affirmation of an opposition of homeland

and exile but rather as an articulation of experiences of movement, mixture,
and instability.
Herta Mller was born in the village of Nitzkydorf (or Nitchidorf, to use its
Romanian name) in Banat, a region in western Romania bordered by the
southern Carpathian mountains in the east and the Danube, Tisza and Mures
rivers to the south, west, and north respectively. As part of the Habsburg
Empire until 1918, Banat was home to communities of diverse linguistic
make-up, including primarily German, Romanian, Hungarian, and Serbian
speakers, and even following the incorporation of the majority of the region
into Romania (nominally a nation state) after the First World War it preserved
its multinational character. During and in the wake of the upheavals of World
War II, in which many of the Germans of Romania fought as part of the
Wehrmacht and the SS, the demographics of the region changed dramatically,
partly as a consequence of large scale deportations of German speakers.
Whereas the German speaking population of western Romania, including the
Banat Swabians and the Saxons of the neighboring region of Transylvania,
had numbered some 530,000 in 1941, by 1948 this number had dropped to
330,000 (Kocsis 182). Over the course of the following decades this number
continued to drop as German speakers in Romania took advantage of West
German immigration policies (according to which people of German ethnicity living in the Eastern Bloc could claim German citizenship) and, following
Nicolae Ceausescus rise to power in 1965, the opportunistic practice of the
Romanian government of allowing German speaking citizens to leave the
country in exchange for hard currency. By 2002 there were only 49,000 Germans still living in Romania, roughly half of whom lived in Banat (Kocsis).
In 1968 Mller left Nitzkydorf to attend Gymnasium, roughly the equivalent of English grammar school, in the city of Timisoara, where from 1972 to
1976 she then enrolled at the university to pursue German and Romance
studies. She was affiliated with the so-called Aktionsgruppe Banat, a group of
German speaking writers founded with the aim of pursuing literature that was
socially and politically engaged. The group soon attracted the attention of the
Securitate, and in 1975 several of its members were arrested and the group
itself disbanded. Following completion of her university studies Mller
worked as a translator in a factory until 1979, when she was dismissed for her
refusal to cooperate with the secret police. Niederungen, a collection of stories
depicting life in the small, conservative village of her birth, was published in
1982 in Romania in a heavily censored version, but the manuscript was
smuggled to the west and was published uncensored by Rotbuch Verlag in
1984. In the same year Drckender Tango, another collection of stories was pub-
477
lished (the title story of which, Oppressive Tango, is included in Nadirs),

followed by the publication of her first novel, Der Mensch ist ein grosser Fasan auf
der Welt, in 1986. In 1987 Mller left Romania for West Berlin with her then
husband and fellow German-Romanian author Richard Wagner. In 1989 she
published Reisende auf einem Bein, a novel portraying the displacement and
alienation suffered by a political refugee from the East in Germany. She has
since published three novels, namely Der Fuchs war damals schon der Jger (The
Fox was then the Hunter; 1992), Herztier (1994), and Heute wr ich mir lieber
nicht begegnet (1997), several collections of essays, copious articles in wide array
of forums, and four collections of collage poems, the most recent of which,
Este sau nu este Ion (It is or it is not John), is in Romanian. She has been awarded
numerous literary prizes, including the Marieluise-Fleier Prize (1990), the
Kranichsteiner Literary Prize (1991), the Kleist Prize (1994), the European
Literary Prize Aristeion (1995), and the Berlin Literary Prize (2005); in 1998
The Land of Green Plums won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
Mllers first impulse to write came after she left the village of her birth as a
girl barely fifteen years of age for the city of Timisoara. As someone from a
German speaking community in which she had studied Romanian only as a
foreign language in school Mller had difficulty communicating with the
people of the city, even after having lived there for a few years. She likened her
vocabulary to an allowance that, even as it grew, never seemed quite enough to
buy what she wanted (andere Augen, 26). As she commented in an interview in 1984 soon after the publication of the uncensored version of Nadirs:
For some time I was entirely thrown back on my own devices. I couldnt establish contacts, I couldnt speak with the people (Ort 124). Reflecting in
this new setting on the experiences of her childhood, she realized that it had
been sprachlos (speechless). She first began to write poetry in order to
reassure myself that I had a language []. I began to dismantle my childhood
systematically (Ort 124). Through this process of dismantling she came to
realize that beneath the customs and practices of the community of her native
village lay repressed collective memories of the recent war, in which the majority of the men, including her father, had fought as members of the SS. She
observed the recurrence of the word Heimat (homeland) in the drinking
songs: Nach meiner Heimat, da ziehts mich wieder / Es ist die alte Heimat
noch (To my homeland I again am drawn / It is yet the old homeland), and
began to grasp that, beyond the drunkenness there lay another yearning. Not
for another place, but rather for another time: the memory of the war (Heimat 214). With this perception came an altered understanding both of the
culture of the village itself, which increasingly came to seem a community living in denial of its own past, and of her own identity as a Banat Swabian. As
478
she later wrote, This is how I suddenly came to stand outside and wanted to
stand outside. That I could not stand the folk festivals and the glossiness of
the black boots (Teufel 24). She began to write the stories of Nadirs as a
deliberate gesture of separation and an attack against this identity, [] this
Banat Swabian village, against this speechless childhood, that stifled everything (Resig-Nation 300).
In Nadirs Mller situates herself as a figure on the margins of an oppressive
community in which corruption is rampant and adherence to rigid norms of
behavior is exacted through physically harsh and psychologically abusive
means. Told for the most part in present tense from the perspective of a
young girl, the stories portray the hypocrisy of a community of Banat Swabians at once proud of their distinctive cultural heritage and unable or unwilling to confront either their recent past or the violence of the social practices
through which they enforce conformity. Stark descriptions merge with visions from fantasies and nightmares, creating a tense contrast between the
mundane and the surreal. The narrator attempts to negotiate her place in a
community in which she is expected to pay tribute even to the most transparently false images. Far from an evocation of a home for which the author
might cherish even the faintest nostalgia, Nadirs is an unsparing attack on the
idyllic image of life in the German villages of Banat. In an interview with the
Sddeutsche Zeitung Mller commented that the title of the work referred literally to the low-lying plain of the Banat, but metaphorically to base consciousness [], isolation, the desire not to look up and the inability to see outside oneself (lebensfeindlich).
Curiously, though there is little mention in the stories of the communist regime in Romania, some reviewers were nevertheless hasty to characterize the
book as a critique of life under the rule of Ceausescu. Irena E. Furhoff, for instance, writing for the International Fiction Review, comments:
The poetry clashes with details used to describe fear, for example, in suppressed sexuality
as a signum for the inability of communication in fascist Romania []. Grotesque descriptions of peasant life in a small village act as a metaphor for the oppression of dictatorship. The text implies a summary of fascism: the absence of humanism, the absence of
communication, in short, the lack of appreciation for life. (1)
Such a conclusion implies that writing coming out of Romania in the 1980s,
and perhaps particularly writing by an author who was soon to emigrate, must
concern itself primarily with the communist regime, implicitly if not explicitly.
Moreover it implies that it was ultimately the authoritarian government that
was the source of all oppression. The grotesqueness of the depictions of village life is ascribed to their function as metaphors, thus depriving them of any
referential value, and the failure of communication is blamed on the dictator-
479
ship. Perhaps more astute, if less enthusiastic, were those who responded to
the publication of Nadirs with the accusation of Nestbeschmutzung, or befouling
the nest. While the dictatorship is undeniably present as a backdrop to many
of the stories, the focus of the collection is the hypocrisy of a minority community intransigent in its insistence on conformity and adherence to retrograde traditions.
The Funeral Sermon, the first piece in the collection, is perhaps the most
expressive of the narrators status as an outsider. In a nightmarish vision she
tells of her fathers funeral, over the course of which members of the village
approach her and denounce her father as an adulterer, rapist, and murderer.
They then turn to her to speak in his memory, and when she fails, they pronounce judgment on her:
We are proud of our community. Our achievements save us from decline. We will not let
ourselves be insulted, he said. We will not let ourselves be slandered. In the name of our
German community you are condemned to death (11).
The narrators transgression against the community consists both of her

knowledge of her fathers crimes, albeit knowledge imparted to her by the villagers themselves, and her failure to intone a ritualistic eulogy, a failure that indicates her unwillingness to disregard those crimes. Such a failure is tantamount not merely to an admission of her fathers wrongs, but also to an
acknowledgment that the image of the community that the villagers have been
at pains to preserve is false. The narrator thereby constitutes a threat to a selfimage that relies for its maintenance on a conspiracy of silence on the part of
every member of the group. In writing these stories Mller herself violated
this conspiracy and suffered, like her narrator, ostracism. She herself comments: After the publication of my first book the people of the village spat in
my face when they came across me in the street (In jeder Sprache 29). Indeed, because of her writings the village barber turned away her grandfather, a
ninety-year-old man who had been a customer of his every week for decades.
If the figure of the exile is constructed by means of the notion that the
homeland is a unified ethno-culture, Herta Mllers Nadirs upsets this process
by revealing this identity to be a narrative built on denial of the past, intolerance with respect to difference, and a tenuous interlinking of social custom
and language. As the title of the story About German Moustaches and Hair
Parts suggests, Swabian identity is as much a matter of adherence to a set of
arbitrary practices as belonging to a linguistic minority. Through such gestures as parting ones hair or wearing a moustache the individual expresses a
willingness to submit to the will of the group, however apparently absurd or
whimsical. The mechanical performance of tradition functions as an ex-
480
pression of restraint and submission, even, or rather precisely, when

these traditions have become anachronistic. The mothers in the title story
continue to wear their traditional garb, and it only appears that their daughters have abandoned their regional costumes. [] But their brains are dressed
in them (47). The maintenance of what is perceived to be a distinctive German identity is crucial to the preservation of the communitys belief in its superiority. However, this conviction depends on the willingness of the entire
community to sanction or deny violence both past and present, whether it
be the participation of the majority of the men of the community in the war
as members of the SS or the domestic violence that mars the narrators
childhood. The story concludes with a striking metaphor as night falls over
the village:
The frogs were croaking from all the living and the dead of this village. Everybody
brought a frog along when they immigrated. Ever since theyve existed they have been
praising themselves that they are Germans, and they never talk about their frogs, and
they believe that whatever you refuse to talk about doesnt exist either. (7576)
Mller offers an explanation of this metaphor of the frog as an embodiment

of the inescapable gaze of the community: The German frog in Nadirs is an
attempt to find a formulation of a feeling the feeling of being watched. []
The German frog transformed everything into vanity and interdiction. It
knew that individual parts, when they are peculiar, do not build a group
(Teufel 2021).
In this dismantling of the community of her childhood Mllers bilingual
existence played a role by helping her to establish a critical distance between
experience and language. However, as she observes in the essay In jeder
Sprache, this tension between different manners of naming the world was in
fact part of her childhood. In the dialect of her native village one said der
Wind geht (the wind blows or literally the wind goes), while in the High German spoken in school one said der Wind weht. Because the verb to blow (or
more precisely waft), wehen, sounds like the noun Weh, or pain, as a
seven-year-old child Mller understood the sentence to mean that the wind
was suffering. In Romanian, which she had begun to learn at the time as a second language, one uses the verb bate, which coincidentally bears the same
double-meaning as the verb to blow in English. In other words to the
seven-year-old this formulation sounded as if in Romanian the wind were
doing harm to someone else. Such tensions undermine the complacency of
language, calling attention to the metaphorical nature of figuration, and the
modalities through which language establishes systems of value as apparently
self-evident. As Mller commented in an interview, in bilingual regions both
481
languages assume their place in ones head and acquire their own naturalness,
while however throwing each other into question (qtd. in Haines ed. 15). The
tension between languages transforms apparently simple objects from sites of
consensus into subjects of contention, and the word in ones mother tongue
is no longer the only measure of things (In jeder Sprache, 26).
This tension between languages is present in the title of her first novel, Der
Mensch is ein grosser Fasan auf der Welt (translated as The Passport). Written while
Mller herself was awaiting her papers to leave the country, the novel recounts
the struggle of Windisch, a village miller, to obtain passports for himself and
his family in order to immigrate to Germany. Like Nadirs, this novel is a bleak
portrayal of the corruption, narrow-mindedness, and vain ethnocentrism of
village life, and in particular the abuse of power by village authorities to extort
money and sexual favors. The title, literally man is a big pheasant in the
world, plays on the contrasting connotations of the word pheasant in German and Romanian. As Mller explains, in German the pheasant is a braggart,
in Romanian a loser (what in English one might call a turkey). Though the
characters of the story are German speakers, when they utter this phrase its
Romanian connotations prevail, an interpretation emphasized in the English
rendering, A man is nothing but a pheasant in the world (Passport 9, my italics).
First spoken by the night watchman, the phrase is repeated by Windisch when
he learns that his daughter is taking the contraceptive pill and is therefore undeniably sexually active and presumably submitting to the desires of local officials in order to facilitate the familys application for the papers necessary to
obtain passports. The statement has the quality of proverbial knowledge and
thereby knowledge that is second-hand, but in German it has undergone a peculiar transformation because of the very different connotations of the word
pheasant. Even as Windisch invokes this common knowledge and performs
the ritual of its assertion he is doubly distanced from the phrase, both by the
fact that as a formula it is not his and uttered in his native tongue it bears an
absurdity similar to the absurdity it has in the literal English rendering. (One
might note that the English translation of the title, by substituting the eminently logical title passport for the German, misses the opportunity to create in English an effect of estrangement and ambiguity similar to that of the
German title.) Indeed as he utters the phrase, [w]hat Windisch hears is not
his voice. He feels his naked mouth. It is the walls that have spoken (70).
There is an analogy between this failed attempt to assert proverbial knowledge as fact and the incongruence between the realities of the villagers lives
and the images of collective identity conjured by their invocation of formulaic
language. The post woman laments to Windisch that young people no longer
come to funerals when a village elder has passed away, reminding him be-
482
tween her sobs to bring her a few sacks of flower as a bribe if he expects her to
process his application for passports. In conversations between Windisch and
the night watchman contradictory languages prevail concerning women.
While Windisch persistently disparages women in general, and his wife in particular, as dissolute and prey to the most base desires, in his need to sustain the
narrative of the moral superiority of the community he nevertheless insists on
the virtue of Swabian women in comparison with women in the west, remarking that [t]he worst one here is still worth more than the best one there. []
They would prefer to walk naked on the street if they could (64). Yet he remains aware that in order to obtain passports for the family his daughter will
have to offer herself both to the Romanian militiaman and the German priest:
If things go well, [the priest] looks for the baptismal certificates five times. If hes doing
his job thoroughly, he looks ten times. With some families the militiaman loses and mislays the applications and the revenue stamps seven times. He looks for them on the mattress in the post office store room with the women who want to emigrate. (43)
Infuriated by his own helplessness, Windisch takes refuge in a superstitious,

fatalistic understanding of the world according to which chance events dictate
the fate of the individual; he explains the death of a local boy in an accident,
for instance, as the consequence of the whim of an owl who had settled the
night before on the rooftop of the young mans house. He refuses to recognize his own complicity in his daughters prostitution, instead venting his
frustration by castigating his wife as a whore, a reference to the time immediately after the war, when as a prisoner in Russia she survived by exchanging
sexual favors for food and other forms of assistance, including a physicians
certification that spared her from working in the mines. As Karin Bauer observes, the phrase women who want to emigrate is a substitution expressive
of this denial on the part of the men of the community of their roles in the exploitation and abuse of women, as the women who visit the priest and the militiaman are in fact wives and daughters of men who want to emigrate (270).
Ironically, by reinforcing the perception of helplessness and providing a pretext for inaction, this strategy of denial contributes to the passivity and conformity on which both the communist regime and the narrowly ethnocentric
community depend.
The Passport, like Nadirs, depicts the village as a place of corruption and hypocrisy, but the presence of the communist government as a force in the lives
of the villagers is more palpable here, creating a broader context in which the
rigid codes of behavior acquire greater significance as part of a strategy to preserve the communal identity (however narrowly defined, ethnocentric, or
anachronistic) as a site of refuge from their helplessness in the face of the
483
authoritarian regime. The plot of the novel centers around the struggle of
Windisch and his family to leave the country and the suffering and humiliation
they are willing to endure to do so; it reflects the grim circumstances of life in
Romania under Ceausescu, where the villagers, living already meager existences, are subjected to unannounced requisitions of their livestock and the
fruits of their harvests. The official rhetoric demands allegiance to our fatherland the Socialist Republic of Romania and Comrade Nicolae Ceausescu [] the father of our country (51), but Windsich is reminded of his
status as a member of a less than welcome linguistic minority in this fatherland
by the hostile reactions of a Romanian who cautions him: No more German.
[] This is Romania (53). Adherence to tradition becomes a flight into a lost
elsewhere or else-time, in which the villagers can conceive of themselves as
having been in control of their destinies; and the more the villagers fear the
loss of this identity as a refuge, the more crucial its maintenance as something
static and assured. Mller commented: As the situation worsened in the villages, people thought ever more distinctly in two directions when they spoke
of homeland. The old direction remained. And the new one that emerged
was Germany (Heimat 218). This alternative, however, only hardens the
need for tradition, as it too poses a threat to the survival of the community.
This explains the tension in the novel between the utter stasis of village life
and Windischs perception, his first utterance in the novel: the end is here.
The novel portrays adherence to a static notion of cultural identity, not as a
promise to preserve that identity, but as a symptom of its imminent demise.
Mllers later novels set in Romania, The Fox was then the Hunter, The Land of
the Green Plums, and The Appointment, give greater attention to persecution suffered under Ceausescus dictatorship, but the Banat-Swabian village as a site
of oppression is never far in the background. The Fox was then the Hunter, an
adaptation of an earlier screenplay, tells the tale of a school teacher who,
warned by a friend that the authorities intend to apprehend her as part of a
series of mass arrests, takes refuge in a village from where she watches on
television the events of Ceausescus fall in December 1989. Drawing on
Mllers experiences as a teacher and someone who, having declined to serve
as an informant, was then repeatedly summoned for interrogation, the story
depicts the gradual fragmentation of an individuals sense of self. The Appointment, or, literally translated, today I would rather not have met myself, tells
of the hardships suffered by a nameless factory worker who, in desperate
hope of fleeing the country, has sewn her address and the plea marry me
into garments bound for Italy. Fired from her job and summoned repeatedly
for interrogations, she struggles to maintain her sanity in a world in which
even the agents of the state seem to be victims of the same tragic farce; the
484
novel closes with the words: [t]he trick is not to go mad (214). A devastating
depiction of the psychological damage inflicted by Ceausescus dictatorship,
the novel also offers a disturbing portrayal of the techniques of unpredictable
and seemingly arbitrary harassment employed by the totalitarian state to corrode even the most intimate relationships.
A complex intermeshing of the protagonists childhood memories, her experiences as a university student in the city of Timisoara, and then as emigrant
bound for Germany, The Land of Green Plums is perhaps the most autobiographical or autofictional (a term she borrows from George Arthur
Goldschmidt) of Mllers novels. The German title, Herztier or heart-beast, is
a word used by the narrators grandmother as she enjoins her to rest your
heart beast, or be at peace. The narrator herself repeats this phrase standing
over her grandmothers dead body at the close of the novel. The English title
refers to the admonition of the protagonists father not to eat green plums, for
the soft pits cause a raging fever [that] will burn your heart up (15). The
plums take on significance not only as a symbol of the superstitions and dishonesty of the narrators family and the community from which she hails, but
also as a characterization of the policemen in the city, who stuff their cheeks
with the sour fruit: Plumsucker was a term of abuse. Upstarts, opportunists,
sycophants, and people who stepped over dead bodies without remorse were
called that. The dictator was called a plumsucker too (Green Plums 50).
The novel begins with the narrator as a university student in Timisoara,
where she makes the acquaintance of Edgar, Georg, and Kurt, three other
Banat Swabians who share her grave doubts concerning the death of one of
her dorm mates, declared a suicide by the authorities. The four become close
friends, sharing one anothers writings, reading forbidden books smuggled
from the west, and discussing shared feelings of alienation from the communities of their birth. Upon completion of their studies they are each assigned
positions in different parts of the country, but they visit one another and
maintain their friendships. Eventually dismissed from their jobs and subjected to increasingly brutal harassment by the authorities, the narrator and
her friends begin ever more resolutely to contemplate emigration to Germany. Georg finally departs, and six weeks later is found dead on the street beneath the open window of his room on the sixth floor of a hostel in Frankfurt.
Edgar and the narrator too finally emigrate, leaving behind Kurt, who dies
amidst mysterious circumstances in 1989, just before the fall of Ceausescu.
Several connections emerge between the events and characters of the novel
and Herta Mllers experiences as a child in a Banat Swabian village, a university student in Timisoara, and an immigrant. The narrators small circle of
friends is clearly drawn on Mllers ties to the Aktionsgruppe Banat men-
485
tioned above. As mentioned earlier, they parodied the narrowly nationalistic

traditions and literature of their home communities, for which they were denounced as Nestbeschmutzern, and adopted a critical stance towards the
government, but placed great hope in visions of reform socialism. Indeed, the
same year the group was founded Richard Wagner, for a while Herta Mllers
husband, joined the communist party. For a brief time in the climate of
post-1968 they were able to write with some freedom, but as Ceausescus rule
became increasingly autocratic they found themselves under ever more invasive scrutiny by the secret police. In 1975 four members of the group, including Wagner, were arrested under suspicion of plotting to flee the country, one,
William Totok, was sentenced to eight months in prison, and the group itself
was dissolved. The censorship and abuses of the authorities notwithstanding,
the literature of the Aktionsgruppe Banat remained significant not only as the
work of a linguistic minority living under what was later to become infamous
as perhaps the most oppressive of Central Europes communist regimes, but
also for its influence on the Romanian literature of the following decades.
Simona Popescu, a member of the so-called eighties generation of poets in
Romania (who drew their inspiration from such authors as Allen Ginsberg,
Frank OHara, and John Ashbery), wrote of the poetry written in German in
Romania that it said more and in a form full of force and artistry than Romanian poetry: This poetry was a synthesis of the mentality, expressivity, and
sensibility, individual and communal, of that time [], profoundly current,
profoundly Romanian, and vital (cited in Mihaiu). Without overstating parallels between the work of fiction and the biography of the author, I suggest
that three of the main characters are based at least loosely on members of the
Aktionsgruppe Banat. Edgar could be identified with Wagner, Georg with
Rolf Bossert, who, like the character in the novel, was found dead on the
street beneath the window of his room soon after his emigration to Germany
and presumed to have committed suicide, and Kurt with Roland Kirsch, who
died in Romania in 1989 under circumstances that remain unexplained.
As revealed in the essay Hunger und Seide: Mnner und Frauen im Alltag
(Hunger and Silk: Men and Women in Everyday Life), published in 1995 as
part of a volume by the same title, the fate of Lola, the narrators dorm mate
who is alleged to have committed suicide, is clearly modeled on one of
Mllers experiences as a student in Timisoara. As the narrator learns from the
diary she left behind, Lola had probably been pregnant from one of many
casual sexual encounters with men unknown to her. Her pregnancy
threatened to embarrass the Party, to which she had recently been admitted.
Whether her death was actually a murder staged by her new lover, himself a
man prominent in the Party, is unclear, but it is declared a suicide by the auth-
486
orities. They hang a photograph of Lola at the entrance to the dormitory with
the text underneath: This student has committed suicide. We abhor her
crime and we despise her for it. She has brought disgrace upon the whole
country (23). In Hunger and Silk Mller writes of her memories of a similar
incident from her time at university:
A medical student in the last year of her studies was pregnant. She performed an abortion on herself. In the following days she ran a high fever. She needed to go to the hospital. Out of fear of the hospital and fear of being sentenced to prison she hanged herself
in a room in one of the dormitories. After the burial there was a meeting of the university
administrators. In the presence of other students she was expelled post mortem from
the party and the school. In the main hall of the dormitory in which she had hanged herself a photograph of her was hung. Alongside it a caption that presented her as a
negative example (7980).
The pro-natal policies of the Ceausescu regime, according to which the fetus
is the socialist property of the whole society, (de Nve 68) offered women incentives to have children, and banned abortion, as well as any form of contraception. The policy infringed on the most intimate spheres of life. Women
were obliged to undergo regular gynecological examinations and couples
were interrogated about their sexual habits. Both abortion and contraception
were punishable by prison sentences. In an essay written for a book of photographs by Kent Klich entitled Children of Ceausescu Mller describes the now
infamous orphanages across Romania, where the unwanted children of the
governments pro-natal policies were domiciled: They were for the children
with no parents, whose mothers were in prison after an illegal abortion or
dead at the hands of some back-street abortionist (n.p.).
Although Land of the Green Plums centers on the torments suffered by the
four main characters at the hands of the authorities, much of what the narrator
endures bears an eerie similarity to the mechanisms of the tyranny under which
she lived as a child in a Banat Swabian village. The belt with which Lola
strangles herself reminds the narrator of the belt with which her mother would
bind her to a chair as a child in order to cut her nails, and the brutal methods of
her interrogator recall how, as a child, she was maltreated: They slapped my
hands and looked me right in the eye to see how I took it (34). As she begins to
read works of German philosophers that have been smuggled into the country
she is startled by the difference between the use of German as a language of inquiry and the language of suppression she had known in her childhood:
The books were written in German, our mother tongue [] Not the official language of
the country. But not quite the childrens bedtime language of the village either. The
books were in our mother tongue, but the silence of the villages, which forbids thought,
wasnt in them (47).
487
As she gradually comes to understand the significance of her fathers participation in the Second World War, the narrator begins to see him as a member
of a community burdened by memories of its participation in the crimes of
the war. Rather than confront their past, her father and the other members of
his generation continue to take refuge from their guilt and powerlessness by
exacting conformity and reciting reactionary assertions of racial superiority to
assert their difference and distance from the corruption of the Romanian
state under communism. Her mother enjoins the narrator to clap along with
everyone else, and when she suspects that her daughter has taken up with
three different men she chastises her in a letter, noting [t]hank God, theyre
all German, but its still whoring (165). The narrator suffers under the weight
of her fathers sins, and she is ill at ease in the presence of Herr Feyerabend, a
Jewish man, fearing that he could feel that someone like me was staring at a
Jew (133). She confesses to him that her father was an SS man who up until
his death had sung songs to the Fhrer. Herr Feyerabend, as preoccupied
with the tyranny of the dictatorship of the proletariat as he is with the events
of the war, responds that the children of the community salute to their leader
just like they did under Hitler (134). And Kurt, having mentioned to the
narrator that his father was also a member of the SS, notes: a couple of years
after Hitler, and they were all crying their hearts out over Stalin. [] And
since then theyve been helping Ceausescu make graveyards (174).
In many of her essays Mller discusses more explicitly the parallels between
what she perceives as the tyranny of her native village and the tyranny of the
communist regime. In stark terms she goes so far as to equate the two: the
first dictatorship that I knew was the Banat Swabian village (qtd. in Haines
ed. 17). She continues: I experienced a pale version of being subjected to surveillance and conformity to norms, and then the truly jarring, and I was familiar with certain basics. Her family, she writes, had taken great care to keep
her in hand, just as the state later did for different reasons and with admittedly
more destructive methods. It nevertheless took root in the family circle, and
there was this fear that the individual would assert herself, and the individual
is always seen from the outset as a possible enemy of all that is institutional.
What she later come to refer to as the totalitarian state or the dictatorship was,
Mller noted, from a certain point of view merely an extension of the village
in which she felt herself under constant watch.
In 1989, two years after her departure for Germany and well before the
publication of The Fox was then the Hunter, Mller published Reisende auf einem
Bein, a work which stands out as her only extended prose narrative set in Germany. The protagonist Irene leaves a country in the east referred to only as
the other country for Germany, initially to join Franz, a man she had met
488
during his travels as a tourist in her native country, but as their relationship
frays she resolves to stay in Germany and begins the process of application
for citizenship. Her decision to seek asylum notwithstanding, she remains an
outsider in Germany, set apart by her distinctive dialect and her antagonism
towards any normative notion of belonging, a reaction the origins of which lie
in her unpleasant experiences of the oppression of ethnic and national identity in the other country. As Brigid Haines argues, the novel can be read as a
depiction of the fragmentation of self as both a symptom of trauma and a survival strategy through which the victim of trauma finds refuge from rigid concepts of identity imposed from the outside (The Unforgettable). As Haines
notes, however, Irenes trauma is, in contrast to the traditional narrative of
exile, not a break with something whole, but rather another in a series of displacements.
Aussiedler is a somewhat paradoxical term that has come to refer to Germans
who, as emigrants or the descendents of emigrants to the east, sought to return
to Germany during and immediately after the Cold War. Reisende auf einem Bein
explores the many unresolved ambiguities that reside in the term German,
both as an adjective referring alternately to citizenship, ethnicity, or cultural affiliation, and as a noun designating a single language. Arriving in Germany,
Irene finds herself very much an outsider. As an ethnic German (an Aussiedler) she is guaranteed citizenship, although only after going through the routines of a formulaic application process that leaves no room for anything other
than officially sanctioned distinctions. Culturally, however, she remains a
foreigner. Asked repeatedly where she is from by people confused by her unusual German, she is confronted with the paradoxes of national identity and can
only think of herself as a foreigner in a foreign country (Reisende 50). When a
Swiss born Italian describes himself as an outsider, she replies Its not that I
dont have a homeland. Its just that I am abroad (my translation; the published
English translation misleadingly renders Irenes Ich bin nicht heimatlos as I
have a homeland, which transforms Irenes tentative claim that, literally, she is
not homeland-less into a confident and overly assertive affirmation). The
distance between the German of her native community and the German
spoken in Berlin foregrounds the plurality of contrasting voices (dialectical, socioeconomic, generational) inhabiting any language, and serves as a reminder
that language is not a stable sanctuary but rather a site of contestation. For a
writer like the Hungarian Sndor Mrai, who left Hungary in 1948 but continued to write in his mother tongue, Wilhelm von Humboldts contention that
Die Wahre Heimat ist eigentlich die Sprache (the true homeland is really language) may have had some substance; for Irene (and Mller), however, who
lives amidst the diversity of voices comprising the German language, the notion
489
that language is a refuge separable from place, a portable homeland as Mller

ironically refers to it (In jeder Sprache 29), is chimerical.
Irenes (and Mllers) experiences with the formalities of the immigration
process reveal further complexities and ambiguities of the term German,
including latent meanings that bear the imprint of ethnocentric notions of
identity resting for their substance on conflict. Just as Irene, who thinks when
asked to identify herself in accordance with the various categories on the immigration documents, There was no column that could have described me
(19), Mller herself encountered difficulties when the circumstances of her
flight from Romania did not correspond to the possible models offered by the
office of immigration:
I had left a dictatorship for political reasons, and the German officials wanted to know a
bit about my status as a German [mein Deutschtum]. When I answered yes to the question
as to whether, given my deportment, I would have been persecuted had I been Romanian, the official sent me to the police division for aliens. He stated: either German refugee or political refugee (Hunger und Seide. (25)
Mllers experience raises questions concerning the ambiguities of West Germanys policies towards immigrants from the East and exposes the historical
locatedness of the categories on which they are based. The secondary literature on German immigration law is unanimous that German citizenship has
been based on the Jus sanguinis, the law of blood or principle of descent since
the Nationality Law of the German Empire and States of 1913. Indeed, this
consensus has perhaps contributed to somewhat hasty overstatements, such
as the contention by Rogers Brubaker that the system of jus sanguinis, with no
trace of jus soli, continues to determine the citizenship status of immigrants
and their descendents today (65). While the principle of Jus sanguinis unquestionably played a crucial role in the issue of citizenship in Germany throughout the Cold War and in its immediate aftermath, descent was by no means a
sufficient condition for the granting of citizenship. If, for instance, the child
of Aussiedler parents who had been granted citizenship did not speak German,
or was unable to demonstrate that he or she partook of a German cultural
heritage however vaguely defined, the application could be, and many times
was, declined. As Stefan Senders observes, such cases demonstrate that German citizenship, and by extension German identity, was, far from being
merely a question of descent, a question of affirming Germanys cultural conception of itself. In some cases an applicant could compensate for ignorance
of German and unfamiliarity with German culture by demonstrating that he
or she had identified him/herself as German and suffered discrimination as
such. In the case of an applicant from Russia who was at first denied and later
granted German citizenship the court found:
490
if [the applicant] was regarded as having continuously counted as a German and as having suffered as a consequence disadvantage, then she could be considered as having a
connection of acknowledgment with the German ethnie, even without mastery of the
German language (qtd. in Senders 93).
As Amanda Klekowski von Koppenfels argues, the granting of citizenship is

not based solely on descent, but rather on persecution arising as a consequence of having been identified as German: the potential Aussiedler must
have represented himself as a German to others and, as a direct result, have
suffered ethnically based discrimination (107). Mllers insistence that she
had suffered persecution for her personal comportment and not as a member
of the German minority calls into question the rationale of the practice of
considering maltreatment a factor in ones cultural or ethnic identity. The presumption of conflict as a constitutive element of cultural identity revives the
more strident strains of nineteenth and twentieth century nationalism.
As a portrayal of the alienation and estrangement experienced by a German
migr from the east, Traveling on One Leg is less a critique of contemporary
capitalist Germany than a deflation of the narrative of homecoming implicit
in the paradoxical term Aussiedler. Though refugees from the tyranny they suffered in the other country, neither Irene nor Mller herself can regard Germany as a homeland, and most certainly not the land of her dreams, as
Klaus Bittermann contended in an article highly critical of Mllers stance on
political issues. Mller writes with palpable bitterness on the responses that
characterized her vision of Germany as false: where I am from, that is what I
should write on. In my second, better life here at the German bread crust I
have the right to bite and swallow. But with this mouth, then empty, now full
but still foreign, it is only fitting that at least I do not speak while eating
(Und noch erschrickt unser Herz 3031). Her experience constitutes a reminder of the traumas suffered by successive generations of Aussiedlern since
the end of World War I, who were received with more and less acceptance in
West Germany and expected to shed their distinctive cultural habits in exchange for a life of relative prosperity. As Peter Paul Nahm, state secretary
from 1953 to 1967 of the German Federal Ministry for Expellees, Refugees,
and War Victims (Bundesministerium fr Vertriebene, Flchtlinge und
Kriegsgeschdigte), wrote: the assumption or expectation that the home of
an individual can be replaced by general economic advancement is a fallacy
born out of a purely materialistic outlook on life (153).
In 1993 Mller published her first collection of text based collages as a
box set of postcards entitled Der Wchter nimmt seinen Kamm (The Guard takes
his Comb). This was followed by Im Haarknoten wohnt eine Dame (In the
Topknots Lives a Lady) in 2000, Die blassen Herren mit den Mokkatassen (The
491
Pale Men with the Mocha Cups) in 2005, and the Romanian language collection Este sau nu este Ion (It is or is not John) in 2005. The poems of these collections are accompanied by images ranging from silhouettes of human
forms, often disproportionate or maimed, to collages combining color
images. Like Mllers prose works, many collage poems touch on themes of
displacement and alienation, but the genre affords her new means of visually
depicting traumas of rupture and dislocation. Shifts in color, size, and font
from word to word or phrase to phrase dramatize stark semantic incongruities, revealing a poem as a whole to be a brutal assembly of divergent
parts torn from different contexts. As such, the collages can be read as expressions of Mllers resistance to any unifying total vision, including
national communism and ethnic nationalism.
The genre also enables Mller to resist the concentric tendencies of language itself. The interruptions of collage disrupt unities, fracturing sentences,
and, in the case of many of Mllers poems, even individual words. A collage
poem from Die blassen Herren mit den Mokkatassen depicts a gathering of men
wearing traditionally German accoutrements, including edelweiss and bird
feathers in their hats, and speaking of their local band:
stundenlang
pfeifen wir Lieder wie Rtt, rtt, morgen hamma
Schdelweh
( for hours
we pipe songs like ra ta ta, ra ta ta, morrow well have
pounding skulls)
Whereas almost all the other words of the collage are single cut-outs set apart
from one another by distinct fonts and colors, the phrase Rtt, rtt,
morgen hamma Schdelweh is itself a single cut-out, i.e. drawn as a unified
phrase from a single source, though sliced at the penultimate word. A line
from an Austrian drinking song (the word Schdelweh, peculiar to Austrian
German and the Banat Swabian dialect, means headache or literally skullpain), it constitutes an instance of purely rhetorical language, a call for conformity through the incantation of stock language. By visually rendering the
formulaic character of this phrase, Mller draws attention to the normative
force of language as an accumulation of exhortations to consent through perfunctory repetition. The fragmentation of collage allows Mller to stage her
use of language as a form of resistance to this force. She writes of her poems:
In prose I never got so far away, I was lamed by wounds and fears. But here I
am able to get out of this (Schule der Angst 338). As visual depictions of
Roland Barthes notion that the subject is never the source of writing, Mllers
492
collage poems cast language not as a homeland but as a totalizing system

inimical to difference.
In her discomfort with visions of a unitary language as a stable site of identity, Mller differs markedly from many of the canonical figures of exile. For
writers such as Heinrich Heine, Sndor Mrai, Andrzej Bobkowski, Kazimierz Brandys, or even Eva Hoffman, language constituted a kind of a homeland, either as a place of origin or a source of self. Certainly, Mllers experience of exile was fundamentally different in that her flight from the country
of her birth was a return of sorts to her mother tongue. Yet it is precisely this
continuous contact with German that made her keenly sensitive to the multitude of voices through which language is negotiated as an intersection of divergent identities. Whereas the rupture of exile enabled the writers mentioned
to mythologize their native tongues as an essence or place lost, Mller located
her identity in broader cultural terms not limited to language. Indeed she
writes with ire on the notion that she and other German speakers from the
former dictatorships of Central Europe share an identity with West Germans
through a common language:
I cannot get over the comparison according to which the people from the former DDR
are in a situation similar to mine: German through their language. [] The similarity in
lifestyle that people from the DDR share with Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, and Romanians is greater than the similarities they have with the lifestyles of West Germans. The
dictatorships in Eastern Europe were similar to one another on the streets and in inner
spaces. [] This is not divisiveness, this is the truth of the facts. But it sounds sacrilegious compared to the studied sanctimoniousness of sameness. (Hunger und Seide
4546)
Mllers most recent publication of a collection of collage poems in Romanian

is a further expression of her transnational cultural identity. Rich with complex word games, such as the splicing of pronouns out of letters from different sources in order to fracture the unity of I, you, or mine, the poems
treat familiar themes of dislocation and disjuncture. In a poem on her
mothers death Mller uses the ruptures of collage to explore sentiments of
displacement: A sasea gara e-o alta tara (indiferent care o fi ea) (the sixth
station is another country [no matter which it might be]). Rhyme links the
train station (gara), a symbol of transience, to country (tara), a human construct that delimits and asserts possession over geographic space. This suspicion concerning country as a source of stability is further expressed in the
phrase indiferent care o fi ea, which figures, unlike the rest of the poem, as a
single cut-out. Whereas stark shifts in font and color in the rest of the text
continuously arrest the process of interpretation, the uniformity of this
phrase allows it to be read as an authentic (authorial) utterance not tinged with
493
irony. Mllers dexterity with the Romanian language and her ability to appropriate and destabilize it suggest that it is as much a part of her identity as her
so-called native tongue German.
Mllers rejection of the notion that language is homeland invites us to consider the ideological motivations underlying the construction of the author in
exile. It is a reminder that traditional interpretations of exile have at times relied on the force of complacent myths of national identity. Yet, far from existing outside of the space of a national culture, writers in exile have often figured prominently in the construction of these identities (Polish literature
offers abundant examples). In literary history exile has functioned as an ideal
site for the reification of allegedly distinct and discrete national identities, as
the borders of such identities can be more easily delimited in a foreign environment. Furthermore, the space of exile has often been cast in gendered
terms. As Linda McDowell and Joanne Sharp cogently argue in A Feminist
Glossary of Human Geography (1999), travel itself has been understood in western narrative as a gendered practice, frequently the travel of the heroic male.
Exile has often born similar connotations. The archetypal exile Heinrich
Heine writes in his poem In der Fremde (Abroad or In a Foreign Land)
of being kissed in German, while Hungarian poet Gyrgy Faludy describes
himself and his fellow Hungarians in exile in France as a bunch of roving
knights hopelessly in love with the same woman (see the introductory essay
above). Such metaphors of exile, centered on the figure of a narcissistic masculine subject, are utterly incompatible with Mllers experience of displacement.
Given these connotations, the term migrant, which has increasingly
gained currency in literary criticism over the past two decades, may be more
applicable to Mller than exile. This would constitute more than a mere
change of terminology. While the classical notion of exile tended to take
cultural identities for granted and use these identities as the foundation for
interpretation of experience, the term migrant lays emphasis on experience
as the source of continually changing identities. This shift in emphasis
brings with it a loss of the prestige that the term exile has accrued and a deflation of the oppositional tension from which it derives its appeal. Migrant
literature emphasizes the movement and mixture exemplified by Mllers
collage poems in Romanian. However, this term is no less ideologically
weighted. As Carine Mardorossian argues, while the move from exile to migrant literature offers occasion for reflection on the assumptions guiding
critical practice, [the] reconfiguration of these metaphors of displacement
also runs the risk of obscuring the change from an epoch of revolutionary
nationalism and militant anticommunism which produced exiles to an
494
epoch of capitalist triumphalism which makes various migrant experiences

possible (1718). In other words the upheavals of the Second World War
and the Cold War created impermeable borders and exiles, while the end of
the Cold War and the spread of the global market has made political borders
porous and led to an increase in migrants. Mller is perhaps more an expatriate now, who often travels to and from Romania, but she was an exile
when she left. Yet simply to characterize Mller as a migrant is to overlook
the fact that she fled Romania under threat to her person and without any
foreseeable hope for return. Her work cannot be approached through reliance exclusively on concepts of exile or migrant as the sole basis of interpretation. Rather it invites interrogation and historical contextualization of
these notions themselves.
Situated in opposition to three competing narratives of belonging, the
Deutschtmelei (as she calls it) of her native village, the communist utopia
of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and West Germanys (and now reunified
Germanys) conception of itself, Herta Mllers work discredits concepts of
unitary homelands and exposes the deceptions and processes of exclusion
through which they are articulated. As her biography makes clear, German
identity is neither merely an issue of language, nor of cultural traditions, descent, or geography. Rather, it is a matter of belonging to a contested but
chimerical vision of Heimat, of which Celia Applegate observes: Heimat
has never been a word about real social forces or real political situations. Instead it has been a myth about the possibility of a community in the face of
fragmentation and alienation (19). In Mllers case this fragmentation is not
something to be overcome. Rather it is part of a strategy through which the
individual maintains her freedom. In this respect it is misleading to characterize Mller as an exile, even if we qualify the term as in this volume. Unlike the
traditional figure of the exile, whose work tends to participate in this struggle
against fragmentation, Mller perceives diffusion, discontinuity, and dispersal
as opportunities for the active construction of individual identity rather than
as obstacles to the maintenance of collective identity. Moreover, while the
narrative of exile reinforces an opposition between the place lost and the
place found, the familiar past and foreign present, Mller portrays the relationship between cultures of her new home and the country of her birth not
as one marked by irreparable rupture and schism, but rather as an ongoing
process of dialogue and interaction.
495
Works Cited
Applegate, Celia. A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat. Berkeley: U of California
P, 1990.
Bauer, Karin. Patterns of Consciousness and Cycles of Self-Destruction: Nation and
Gender in Herta Mllers Prose. Gender and Germanness: Cultural Productions of Nation. Ed.
Patricia Herminghouse and Magda Mller. New York: Berghahn, 1998. 26375.
Bitterman, Klaus. Warum sachlich, wenns auch persnlich geht. Diesen Monat:
Herta Mller (Why Objective when it Can also be Personal? This Month: Herta
Mller). http://www.live-magazin.de/rubriken/whoswho/who9909.htm. Viewed on
December 1, 2007.
Brubaker, Rogers. Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
UP, 1992.
De Nve, Dorothe. Zwanghafte Gleichberechtigung und kontrollierte Krper Zu den
Lebensbedingungen von Frauen im sozialistischen Rumnien (Compulsive Equality
and Controlled Bodies On the Circumstances of Women in Socialist Romania). Frauen
in Sdosteuropa (Women in Southeast Europe). Ed. Anneli Ute Gabanyi and Hans Georg
Majer. Munich: Sdosteuropa-Gesellschaft, 1998. 5978.
Furhoff, Irena E. Herta Mller: Nadirs. International Fiction Review 30 (2003) P.1.
Haines, Brigid, ed. Herta Mller. Cardiff: U of Wales P, 1988.
Haines, Brigid. The Unforgettable Forgotten: The Traces of Trauma in Herta Mllers Reisende auf einem Bein. German Life and Letters 55.3 (2002): 26681.
Klich, Kent and Herta Mller. Children of Ceausescu. New York: Umbrage, 2002.
Kocsis, Kroly. Changing Ethnic Patterns in Transylvania since 1989. Journal of Hungarian
Studies vol. 21 (2007): 179201.
Mardorossian, Carine M. From Literature of Exile to Migrant Literature. Modern Language
Studies 32.2 (2002): 1533.
McDowell, Linda and Joanne Sharp, ed. A Feminist Glossary of Human Geography. London: Arnold, 1999.
Mihaiu, Virgil. Scriitori germani din Romania: Vnt potrivit pna la tare la momentul potrivit (German Writers from Romania: A Moderate to Loud Wind the Moderate Moment). http://www.memoria.ro/?location=view_article&id=966. Viewed on December 6,
2007.
Mller, Herta and Beverly Eddy. Die Schule der Angst: Gesprch mit Herta Mller, den
14. April 1998 (The School of Fear: Conversation with Herta Mller, April 14, 1998).
The German Quarterly 72.4 (1999): 32939.
Mller, Herta, and Gebhard Henke. Mir erscheint jede Umgebung lebensfeindlich. Ein
Gesprch mit der rumniendeutschen Schriftstellerin Herta Mller. (Every Surrounding Seems Hostile to Me. A Conversation with the Romanian-German Author Herta
Mller). Sddeutsche Zeitung, November 16, 1984. 1617.
Mller, Herta. Und ist der Ort wo wir leben: Interview mit Herta Mller (And is the
Place where We Live: Interview with Herta Mller). Reflexe. Aufstze, Rezensionen und Interviews zur deutschen Literatur in Rumnien (Reflexes. Articles, Reviews and Interviews on
German Literature in Romania). Vol. 2. Ed. Emmerich Reichrath. Cluj-Napoca: Dacia,
1984. 12125.
Mller, Herta. Hunger und Seide. Mnner und Frauen im Alltag (Hunger and Silk. Men
and Women in Everyday Life). Hunger und Seide 6587.
496
Mller, Herta. In jeder Sprache sitzen andere Augen (In every Language there Sits the
Gaze of Another). Der Knig Verneiget sich und ttet (The King Bows and Kills). Munich:
Hanser, 2003. 739.
Mller, Herta. Nachrichten aus der Resig-Nation (Reports out of the Resig-Nation).
Nachruf auf die rumniendeutsche Literatur (Obituary of Romanian-German literature). Marburg: Hitzeroth, 1990. 288300.
Mller, Herta. Und noch erschrickt unser Herz (And our Heart still Takes Fright). Hunger
und Seide 1938.
Mller, Herta. Der Fuchs war damals schon der Jger (The Fox Was already then the Hunter).
Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1992.
Mller, Herta. Der Teufel sitzt im Spiegel: Wie Warhnehmung sich erfindet (The Devil Sits in the
Mirror: how Perception Invents itself). Berlin: Rotbuch, 1991.
Mller, Herta. Der Wchter nimmt seinen Kamm (The Guard takes his Comb). Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1993.
Mller, Herta. Die blassen Herren mit den Mokkatassen (The Pale Men with the Mocha Cups).
Munich: Hanser, 2005.
Mller, Herta. Drckender Tango (Pressing Tango). Bucharest: 1984; Hamburg: Rowohlt,
1996.
Mller, Herta. Este sau nu este Ion (It is or it is not John). Bucharest: Polirom, 2005
Mller, Herta. Heimat ist das, was gesprochen wird (Homeland Is what is Said). Blieskastel: Gollenstein, 2001.
Mller, Herta. Hunger und Seide (Hunger and Silk). Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1995.
Mller, Herta. Im Haarknoten wohnt eine Dame (In the Topknots Lives a Lady). Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2000.
Mller, Herta. Nadirs. Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P, 1999. Trans. Sieglinde Lug of Niederungen. Berlin: Rotbuch, 1988.
Mller, Herta. Reisende auf einem Bein. Berlin: Rotbuch, 1989. Trans. Valentina Glajar and
Andr Lefevere as Traveling on One Leg. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1998.
Mller, Herta. The Appointment. New York: Metropolitan, 2001. Trans. Michael Hulse and
Philip Boehm of Heute wr ich mir lieber nicht begegnet. Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1997.
Mller, Herta. The Land of Green Plums. New York: Metropolitan, 1996. Trans. Michael Hofmann of Herztier (Heart-Beast). Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1994.
Mller, Herta. The Passport. London: Serpents Tale, 1989. Trans. Martin Chalmers of Der
Mensch ist ein grosser Fasan auf der Welt. Berlin: Rotbuch, 1986.
Nahm, Peter Paul. Der Wille zur Eingliederung und seine Frderung (The Will to Integration and its Promotion). Die Vertriebenen in West-deutschland. Ihre Eingliederung und ihr
Einflu auf Gesellschaft, Wirtschaft, Politik und Geistesleben (Expellees in West Germany.
Their Integration and Influence on Society, Economy, Politics, and Intellectual Life).
Vol. 1. Ed. Eugen Lemberg and Friedrich Edding. Kiel: Hirt, 1959. 14555.
Rock, David, and Stefan Wolff, ed. Coming Home to Germany: The Integration of Ethnic Germans
from Central and Eastern Europe in the Federal Republic since 1945. Oxford, New York: Berghahn, 2002.
Senders, Stefan. Jus Sanguinis or Jus Mimesis? Rethinking Ethnic German Repatriation.
Rock and Wolff 87101.
von Koppenfels, Amanda Klekowski. The Decline of Privilege: The Legal Background to
the Migration of Ethnic Germans. Rock and Wolff 102118.
Post-Yugoslav Theater Exile (Dragan Klaic)
497
Post-Yugoslav Theater Exile:

Transitory, Partial and Digital
Dragan Klaic
The disintegration of the former Yugoslavia in war, violence and ethnic

cleansing throughout the 1990s has caused a mass population displacement
within and among the former federal republics and beyond the 1991 borders
of the country. Hundred-thousands of people sought refugee abroad and only
a small number returned after the Dayton Peace Accord of 1995. The Kosovo
crisis in 1999 prompted further displacement from that province: most Albanians returned after the end of the NATO intervention and most Serbs and
Roma left for good. In the ensuing years, migration from ex-Yugoslavia has
continued and since it has been driven by political motives more than just
economic hardship it can in many cases be qualified as exile.
Among those who left Yugoslavia at the beginning of the crisis (199093)
there were quite a few writers opposing nationalism and its bellicose politics:
Slavenka Drakulic, Dubravka Ugresic, Rajko Djuric, Bora Cosic, and David
Albahari were among the better known figures in a mass exodus of artists, intellectuals, academics, and students. All of them undoubtedly have their own
proper story and complex motivations for moving, but together they created
the new post-Yugoslav Diaspora, spread across Eastern and Western Europe,
North and South America, Australia and New Zeeland, with some persons resettled in Maghreb and South Africa as well.
The post-Yugoslav exodus took along some theater people, belonging to
various performing arts professions: playwrights, directors, actors, dramaturgs, designers, critics, producers, and technicians. If exiled literati need
translators, publishers, and engaged critics to sustain them and help them
reach an audience, the theater professionals need even more: translators and
publishers for sure, but also directors, actors, designers, producers, festival
programmers and, indeed, engaged critics. Theater is a constellation, an infrastructure, a system of provisions and therefore difficult to take along into
exile or to reconstruct and re-deploy.
498
1. Historic Antecedents
Let us consider as a paradigm the German anti-Nazi exile after 1933. Some
theater professionals found a temporary refuge in Austria until the 1938 Anschluss, and a few in Zurich until the end of the war. All efforts to set up German exilic theater companies in Europe were short lived. A few German actors and writers who made it to the US found employment in the Hollywood
studios. Brecht wrote diligently in a Santa Monica (CA) cottage, distant from
the American show business and quite bewildered by it. Playwright Carl
Zuckmayer kept chicken and grew potatoes in New England, writing a bit at
the end of a long farmers day. Among theater directors, Leopold Jessner
came via Palestine to the US in 1937 but couldnt find any professional work,
Max Reinhardt ran an acting school in California that was supported by a rich
fan, and Erwin Piscator taught The March of Drama at the New School in
New York. Broadway offered no opportunity to any of them, and could not
replace the theater infrastructure they left behind in Germany American
show biz remained incompatible with the spirit and the production model of
the European repertory theater that shaped those refugees, their theater notions, and directorial practices. Those German theater professionals who got
stuck in Europe, especially Nazi-occupied Europe, were cut off from the
stage and had to fear for their life. Those who found refuge in Great Britain or
the Soviet Union had to develop alternative skills in order to survive, and they
ran the risk of being isolated as enemy aliens. As the war advanced, theater life
was disrupted not only in Nazi-occupied Europe but also in the UK and in the
Third Reich and its allies.
Another historic paradigm is provided by the exile of artists from the communist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe after 1948. In the long ColdWar period until 1989, some theater professionals sought refuge in the West
in several waves but their size remained limited. In 1976, the Hungarian police
put Pter Halsz and his Szobaszinhz ([Private] Room Theater) group on the
plane and sent them to Paris. After playing in an abandoned store in Rotterdam, they relocated to New York in 1977 and continued in a store front on
23rd street, as Squat Theater. Among the intellectuals and authors who went
abroad after Warsaw Pact armies crushed the Prague Spring reformist movement were theater director Otomar Krejca, who found occasional directors
work in Germany, France, Sweden, Italy and Austria between 1975 and 1988,
and dramatic author Pavel Kohout, who worked as dramaturg in the Vienna
Burgtheater. For all practical purposes, theater director Jerzy Grotowski left
Poland in the mid-1970s, after becoming known world-wide with his international tours in 1969. Made practically stateless after the Jaruzelski military
499
coup of December 1981, Grotowski found refugee in the Odin theater of his
follower Eugenio Barba in Holstenbro (DK), taught shortly in Rome and at
Columbia and settled at the University of California Irvine, more as an artist
in residence than as a teacher. He spent his final years in Centro per la Sperimentazione e la Ricerca Teatrale in Pontendera, Italy (198399). His colleague
Kazimierz Braun lost his directing and teaching jobs in Wroclaw in 1983 and
settled in the USA as a university teacher of theater directing.
In Romania, the harsh cultural policies of Nicolae Ceausescu forced quite a
few theater directors to leave the country in 1970s. Andrei Serban left very
young with a Ford grant in 1971 and stayed in the US, making a successful international career as theater and opera director. Lucian Pintilie distanced himself from the Romanian stage in 1973 after his production of Gogols Inspector
General was banned by the censors. He sought to stay abroad as much as possible, working as theater director in France, in the US, and in the UK. David
Esrig also left Romania in 1973; he led municipal theater companies in Bern
and Essen, and founded in 1995 his own theater academy in Germany.
Throughout the 1970s, Liviu Ciulei worked time and again abroad: he led the
Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis in 198085, staged plays at the Arena Stage in
Washington, and taught at Colombia and NYU. Radu Penciulescu, Vlad
Mugur, and Lucian Giurchescu also left Romania to direct abroad. Most artists left their country after some previous short term absences and after gaining some international recognition abroad. The pattern was set in the later
1960s by the Polish film and theater director Andrzej Wajda, who was not officially in exile but often abroad for a long time, staying away from troubles at
home. In the stage profession, notorious for its discontinuity and high unemployment, directors sought to patch up their stage careers by teaching performing arts at universities. Behind those relatively known personalities there
were dozens of lesser known artists who did not succeed to sustain their theater career in exile. Similar cases could be found in the waves of refugees from
the Latin American dictatorships in 1960s-70s ( Jorge Lavelli), Iranian artists
after 1979, and occasional exiles from African dictatorial regimes.
2. Pre-exilic Theater Life in former Yugoslavia

In order to grasp post-Yugoslav theater exile, we must sketch the theater constellation of former Yugoslavia. Its developed system of performing arts
rested on some hundred publicly subsidized repertory theater companies
with a permanent ensemble, as well as an administrative and technical staff.
Since cultural policy was a responsibility of the six federal republics and two
500
autonomous provinces rather than of the national government, each federal

unit had a well-rounded infrastructure of companies, theater academies on
the university level, festivals, professional associations, theater magazines, numerous amateur groups, and institutions of theater research. Each season
some eight-hundred professional drama productions were presented in various variants of the Serbo-Croat language as well as in Slovene, Macedonian,
Hungarian, Italian, Albanian and Turkish, while amateur and semiprofessional groups made productions also in a few additional minority languages.
In addition, several opera houses staged opera and ballet productions. Many
productions traveled around the country attending numerous festivals and
occasionally went on tours abroad. Since late 1960s, contemporary domestic
playwriting became the most popular repertory component. The most successful Yugoslav playwrights could expect to see their new play staged by a
dozen of rep companies in various languages within one or two seasons.
Since mid-1960s, Yugoslavia had been remarkably open to cultural communication with the rest of the world, which resulted in a rich and diverse repertory, many translations of the contemporary plays, aesthetic influences and
frequent appearances of foreign companies at the international theater festivals in the country. Among them, the BITEF festival of experimental theater,
held in Belgrade since 1967, and the Dubrovacke ljetnje igre (Dubrovnik Summer
Festival, 1950) should be singled out for their appeal and influence; they
were joined in the 1980s by the Eurokaz experimental theater festival in Zagreb. There was no formal censorship but occasionally authorities silently intervened to end the run of a production they disliked; however, because of the
federal system, they could not enforce the ban on the entire country. Beside
publicly subsidized repertory companies, there were occasional productions
of informal professional groups and a growing circuit of small-scale commercial productions. Some major summer festivals created their own productions, pooling artists from various cities.
When several simultaneous nationalist escalations endangered the survival
of the ailing federation in the late 1980s, performing arts went along with the
new fashion, but the chauvinist outbursts were more pronounced in other
forms of cultural production and especially in the media. Nationalist commonplaces popped up in popular comedies, historic plays, or in the commercial cabaret, but historians, poets, and linguists played a much greater role in
the dissemination of nationalist propaganda in books, magazines and television talk-shows. Sensitive to popular appeal, the stage followed in invoking
the supposed injustices and suffering imposed on own nation and blaming
others for oppression and genocide. In contrast, KPGT, a theater and cultural
movement (an acronym formed from the first letter of the world theater in
501
different Yugoslav languages) established in 1985 a stronghold in the Narodno

pozoriste-Npszinhz (National Theater) in Subotica/Szabadka, where it systematically used the stage to resist cultural separatism, and advocated an inclusive and dynamic notion of Yugoslav cultural space, based on cultural diversity.
With its intensive inland tours, festivals in different cities, co-productions
with other companies, international tours and hosting of foreign productions,
KPGT opposed nationalism and took a critical stance against the worsening
socio-economic and political crisis of the country. In 199192, KPGT and its
spiritus movens, Ljubisa Ristic, lost some of key collaborators to exile. In 1994
Ristic further alienated his remaining artistic collaborators and fans by becoming the President of JUL, a nominally leftist and Yugoslav political
party, set up by Mirjana Markovic, the spouse of Slobodan Milosevic, and by
associating himself with their regime. By then, the disintegration of the
country had made KPGT already irrelevant and obsolete as a cultural political
movement; as a producing system, KPGT was made dysfunctional as the
nationalist onslaught made its infrastructure collapse at the outset of the war
in 1991. Armed conflicts cut communication lines, drew new borders, and instigated ferocious ethnic cleansing. Military budgets preempted culture subsidies, and rampant inflation made everyone a pauper except the warlords
and their smuggler allies. Cultural production, especially in the performing
arts, shrunk radically, while borders, war zones and international sanctions
enforced cultural immobility and an overwhelming sense of isolation. This is
the background of the theater exile from former Yugoslavia.
3. Squandered Opportunities: the Roma Theater Pralipe

Most theater exiles were individual artists. Before we make any attempts to
systematize their experiences and trace their exilic paths, attention is due to
two cases of collective theater exile. One is the unique case of the Roma Company Pralipe from Skopje. Founded in late 1971 by Rahim Burhan as an amateur and increasingly semi-professional company, Pralipe created poetic productions in the Romani language, inspired by Artaud, sometimes adapted
from classics (Shakespeare, Sophocles), or works of contemporary Macedo ivko Cingo, Goran Stefanovski) and foreign authors (Lorca, Brecht).
nian (Z
Being practically the only Roma company on the Balkans, if not in Europe,
Pralipe took part in the Yugoslav and international festivals, and co-produced
with the Yugoslav rep companies, esp. with KPGT. It made its mark with temperamental, passionate, poetic, and ritualistic productions pulsating with
502
emotions, but lacking a careful structure and the development of its own stage
esthetics.
With Yugoslavia about to collapse, Pralipe, as many other companies, was
threatened by a loss of its territory of engagement, and could find no means
of survival in the unstable and extremely impoverished conditions of the soon
to be independent Macedonia. Roberto Ciulli of the Theater a.d. Ruhr in Mlheim, Germany, who maintained intensive cooperative ties with theaters
across Yugoslavia since 1979, felt that Pralipe was a European asset and could
not be allowed to disappear. With special subsidies of the German public
authorities he succeeded to bring the company to Mlheim already at the end
of 1990 for the premiere of Blood Wedding, and he ensured that it settled there
in July 1991. Theater a.d. Ruhr provided working opportunities for Pralipe,
and extended its own marketing and publicity resources to make sure that the
old and new Pralipe productions appear at some international festivals in Europe and on the stages of German cities.
Burhan created under the aegis of Ciulli fifteen new productions (among
them of Blood Wedding, Othello, Romeo & Juliet, Der Klassenfeind) between 1991
and 2000, but he experienced the desertion of some of his best actors and had
difficulty in finding new qualified Romany-language performers. He failed to
establish a strong rapport with Roma and Sinti organizations in Germany,
which perhaps saw in Pralipe an upstart competitor for media attention and
subsidies. The company itself profited from the professional possibilities in
Germany but lacked professional actors, except for Nedjo Osman, Suncica
Todic and Ruis Kadirova. Instead of furthering an intensive professional development of the group, stability and security created a certain complacency
and even unhealthy dependence on Ciullis team and its services. Since the
audience was predominantly German, a certain exotic aura of the work shown
was inevitable. Pralipe could not find its own support among the German and
European Roma (who are generally lacking their own cultural and media infrastructure and effective political representation) and was losing ground in
competition with the German companies (freie Gruppen) for space and bookings on the German stages and with other European autonomous companies
at the international theater festivals. Theater a.d. Ruhr remained Pralipes only
structural backer and this overloaded their relationship. After departure from
Mlheim in 2001, Pralipe worked on its own in Dsseldorf, Berlin, and Cologne, producing eight new pieces until 2004, and it sought support in co-productions with the Mostarski teatar mladih (Mostar Youth Theater), Budva
grad teatar (a Montenegro festival), and the MOT festival in Skopje (Happy
Roma 2004). However, it found no sustainable production and operation
model. While nowadays Burhan occasionally directs in the regular repertory
503
companies of former Yugoslavia and earns praise of Macedonian theater

scholars for his pioneering interculturalism (see Luzina and Stojanovska),
Pralipe is for all intents and purposes a finished history.
This originally Macedonian and Yugoslav Roma Company was for a decade
a German Roma ensemble but was unable to win a legitimate position in the
German theater landscape or to become truly European even though Burhan re-baptized it in 2001 as European Roma Pralipe Theater. For such a project Burhan and his colleagues had no artistic capacity and no political astuteness; Roma and European Union political and professional theater support
did not materialize. Romani language and Roma identity, which gave Pralipe
for a long time a specific weight and cultural-political importance, were not
enough to guarantee a professional production machinery or an artistic vibrancy. If exile initially offered professional consolidation thanks to the Theater a.d. Ruhr, and brought, at least in principle, exposure to a larger potential
Roma and non-Roma audience in Germany and across Europe, exile ultimately became a desert in which Burhan lost his way.
4. From Exile to Integration: Thtre Tattoo

Mladen Materics Thtre Tattoo is another, rather resilient, exilic group. It
developed in the 1980s around the Sarajevo Akademija scenskih umjetnosti
(Academy of Scenic Arts) and its experimental venue Obala. In 1986, Materics production of The Tattoo Theater unexpectedly won the Edinburgh
Fringe Award, and this was followed with much foreign touring. A new production, Moonplay (1988), brought Materic to France for a tour. When the war
broke out in Bosnia in April 1992, Materic and some of his actors succeeded
in leaving Sarajevo at the very beginning of the siege and finding, via Belgrade,
a shelter at the Thtre Garonne in Toulouse. Supported by gestures of solidarity by several French co-producers, Materic staged there with his group Le
jour de fte (1993), which was shown in the Thtre de la Bastille in Paris and
elsewhere on tour. Settled in Toulouse and integrated in the French system of
public subsides, co-productions, and pre-arranged tours, Materic and Thtre
Tattoo offered a series of productions: Le Ciel est loin et la terre aussi (1995), Le
Petit spectacle dhiver (1997), LOdysse (1999), La Cuisine (2002), Sequence 3
(2004), and Nouvelle Byzance (2007). This regular rhythm of new productions
by a company in exile, each shown in many places internationally, would be
impressive for any theater group in Europe.
Materic advantage was his aesthetics, derived from the vocabulary of the
mime theater, of performance without practically any spoken words, made of
504
movement, gestures, and images. Even in the early Sarajevo phase he discarded spoken language, the curse of any exilic theater effort, and thus gained
a significant creative advantage for the Thtre Tattoo. Over the years in
France some of his Sarajevo actors abandoned him (in fact, only two remained with him, Jelena Coric and Haris Resic) but he recruited and even
trained additional French performers to fit his style, which was communicable and accessible in his new domicile and elsewhere as well. In addition to
the eliminated language barrier, Materic profited from an international reputation, established even before exile, from the initial hospitality of the Thtre
Garonne at the beginning of his exile, and from a sense of shame and powerlessness that overcame many theater professionals in Europe when seeing the
war in former Yugoslavia and eager to do something, to find a way to engage themselves productively. Since most theater professionals did not possess the courage of Susan Sontag, who went into besieged Sarajevo to direct
there Beckets Waiting for Godot in 1993 under the light of candles and solar batteries, supporting Materic was the least they could do. By the time the war
came to the end with the Dayton Peace Accord (1995) and global interest for
Sarajevo and Bosnia started fading, making space for other, newly developing
catastrophes in the world, Thtre Tattoo was established quite well in the
French system.
Moreover, Materic profited from a less visible but continuous patronage of
his old friend form the Sarajevo Academy, the well-known film director Emir
Kusturica, who also left Sarajevo at the beginning of the siege, settled in Serbia and France, and continued making successful films with subsidies from
the Milosevic government, and international producers. Kusturicas success,
popularity, and network greatly helped Materic establish his company in exile.
In 2001 these two ex-Sarajevans, called now two Serbians in a web blurb,
made jointly an installation at the First Valencia Biennale entitled A Land
Looking to a Continent (The Four Horsemen), using land, transported in
trucks from Belgrade and Sarajevo, to convey the leading role it played in a
series of illusionary metaphors on the horrors of war and destruction, as well
as on love, life and hope (www.union-web.com/la_bienal_de_valencia).
Truncated metaphors aside, Kusturica was an early apologist of Milosevics
bellicose politics, and consistently played down the horrors of the Sarajevo
siege, blaming all parties equally; whereas Materic avoided political statements and played in public a refugee with no special solidarity with his besieged former fellow citizens. Not surprisingly, in 2002 Materic used for his
new production La Cuisine a play by Peter Handke, a staunch advocate of the
Serb cause against the demonization of the Western media. Handkes defense
of the Serbs made him a popular author of the Serbian repertory, but when
505
Materic, supported with several French co-producers, came in 2006 to Belgrade to stage Handkes play The Hour When We Did Not Know Anything About
Each Other (Die Stunde da wir nichts voneinander wussten) in the Narodno
pozoriste (National Theater), the premiere was postponed and then cancelled, with Materic returning to France quite embittered (Blamaza).
5. Between Music and the Stage

Another successful artistic exile from Sarajevo, Goran Bregovic, reached
fame in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1970 as guitarist, leader, and
composer of the rock band Bijelo dugme. He made music for Kusturicas films
before the war, and once in French exile in 1992 he continued composing for
him and other well-known film makers (recently for Patrice Chereaus La
Reine Margot). He embarked with his Wedding and Funeral Band on increasingly complex stage pieces, such as Silences of the Balkans, directed by the Slovene expat Tomaz Pandur for the Thessaloniki European Capital of Culture
in 1997. While composing for Kusturicas films and Pandurs international
productions, Bregovic turned his mlange of Balkan, Eastern European, and
Roma melodies, world and pop music in an appealing intercultural concoction, open for the input of other composers and musicians, and increasingly
popular from France to Poland and further to Singapore, once billed as international, then as an intercultural and, when needed, as an inter-confessional
music event. After the music piece Karmen with a Happy End (2004) Bregovic
made in 2007 Forgive me, is this the way to the future, commissioned by EHO, a
consortium of most prestigious European concert halls, eager to attract a new
young audience. Bregovic success rests very much on his ability to take along
the intercultural capital developed in the dynamic and mobile cultural production of former Yugoslavia, and reinvest it in the broader European cultural
space, in multiple genres, forms, and media, and re-launch it in the realm of a
globalized music industry. He is especially apt to intertwine specific music
traditions and idioms and integrate them under the successful label of world
music, appealing to most divergent audiences with intense emotions, fast
rhythm, and a careful dosage of exoticism.
506
6. Career Shifts and Turns

Undoubtedly, musicians have it easier in exile than actors. Most actors who
left ex-Yugoslavia during the war could not sustain themselves in the profession. Like many other exiled actors before, Dragana Varagic, once she left
Belgrade, found only occasional opportunities to be on stage in Toronto, and
she started, after further studies, teaching theater. Exceptionally, some outstanding actors, well known from the stage, film, and television, reached the
Hollywood studios, just like their predecessors, refugees from the Nazi Germany in 1930s. Mira Furlan, reviled in Zagreb as a traitor of the Croat cause
for playing on the Belgrade stage on the eve of the war, left for New York in
disgust (see Furlan) and she landed by sheer luck in the TV series Babylon.
Rade Serbedzija, the foremost Yugoslav actor, by origin a Serb from Croatia,
left Zagreb and moved to Belgrade before the outbreak of the war, then to
Ljubljana, and finally to London. Unexpectedly, his success in Milcho Manchevskis USA-Macedonian film Before the Rain (1994), much noticed at a Venice film festival, opened for him the prospect of a Hollywood acting career.
Exiled theater directors had a different path. For some of them, exile was a
temporary option, with a return home as the ultimate outcome. From Croatia,
caught in the violent secession and nationalist escalation, Goran Golovko
moved to London but ultimately returned to Split and is now the Director of
Drama at the Croat National Theater. Larry Zappia moved from Rijeka to Toronto but came back to his old theater. Boris Bakal went at the outbreak of the
war from Zagreb via Paris, Belgium, Luxemburg, and the Czech Republic to
Bologna, set up his company there and made seven productions, but returned
to Zagreb in 2001, after the end of the Tud-man regime in Croatia, to start his
Bacaci sjenki (Shadow Casters) initiative. In Croatia, the death of Tud-man and
the electoral defeat of his HDZ party in 2000/2001 marked a watershed, the
end of the militant nationalism as ruling power but not as a political factor.
Consequently, these theater people, and perhaps some other artists, chose to
return to Croatia in 2001, judging that the leaden 1990s are over.
Not Nada Kokotovic, a choreographer and theater director originally from
Zagreb, who has worked since 1978 all over Yugoslavia, chiefly in the KPGT
framework, often in tandem with Ljubisa Ristic, and then increasingly on her
own. She left Subotica in 1992 and settled in Germany. There she started her
career from scratch and proceeded to direct over 30 dramatic and music-theater productions, especially choreodramas in several German repertory companies; in Cologne she ran her own small production organization TKO with
the ex-Pralipe actor Nedjo Osman. In her work, feminist, Roma and exilic
motives invoke frequently the anomic, distant gaze of an outsider; works of
507
ex-Yugoslav authors, such as Biljana Srbljanovic and Filip Sovagovic, appear

only rarely.
Most complicated was the trajectory of Haris Pasovic, a Sarajevo theater director who worked chiefly in Belgrade before the war. In 1990 he started
teaching at the Sarajevo Academy of Scenic Art (where Kusturica and Materic
were his colleagues), but feeling increasingly uncomfortable in the worsening
political situation he went in the spring of 1991 with some of his students to
Subotica, to work under the aegis of KPGT. When the war started in Bosnia
in April 1992, he came to Amsterdam. Offered a chance to direct an international co-production on the martyrdom of Sarajevo for the opening of Antwerp European Cultural Capital 1993 (Sarajevo, Tales from a City, written by
Goran Stefanovski), he moved to Stockholm and started rehearsing; however,
at the end of 1992 he succeeded to smuggle himself into the occupied Sarajevo, at the time when most Sarajevans dreamed about leaving the besieged
city. Once there, he worked with Susan Sontag on her Waiting for Godot production and became a key figure of Sarajevos cultural resistance to war as a
producer, director, pedagogue, and a foremost a cultural activist who sought
various cultural forms to convey the world the outrage of the war in Bosnia
and to strengthen among the Sarajevans their sense of civic and cultural solidarity. In 1994, and again in spring 1995, Pasovic left the still besieged city
with a group of actors, mainly young people, and toured Europe with two of
his productions, eliciting gestures of solidarity with his city. He stayed quite a
long time in Amsterdam even after his company returned in 1996, but ultimately he also returned to Sarajevo, with some reluctance.
The war and its chaotic aftermath pushed Pasovic in different professional
directions, including publishing, film, and television, but he ultimately resumed teaching at the Sarajevo Academy and, after a long pause, continued
directing in theater. His anabasis indicates the confusion and contradictory
impulses of an exile: the need to be engaged and involved; a desire to be freed
of political contingencies and pressures; exploration of theater as an instrument to induce solidarity; a search for more effective tools in other media; internalization of the role of a director as an instigator, organizer, and leader;
and the urge to go on alone, without compromise and encumbering arrangements. Pasovic long march before, during, and after the war through institutions in Novi Sad, Belgrade, Sarajevo, Subotica, the Netherlands, Sweden, and
the UK lead him, as we described it earlier (Klaic Crisis), ultimately to the
Sarajevo National Theater and then, in frustration, to his own institution, The
East West Center, where he directed Hamlet, Faust and Nigel Williams Class
Enemy (20052007). With this last production he appeared in 2008 at the
major international festivals in Singapore and Edinburgh.
508
7. Double Track
Among the playwrights from former Yugoslavia, one sees various exilic strategies that tend to rely on some preserved or renewable professional ties with
the home territory, a double track existence of being here and there, in exile
and in some way, symbolically or even occasionally physically, at the home
base. Goran Stefanovski, a much appreciated Macedonian author with dozens
of productions of his plays across former Yugoslavia, followed his English
spouse and children, and settled in Canterbury, UK in 1992, but continued for
several years to teach occasionally his playwriting courses at the Faculty of
Dramatic Arts in Skopje. He was in a sort of commuting exile. His plays, old
and new, continued being produced in Macedonia, while in the UK and
Sweden he started university teaching and collaboration with performing arts
producers and groups as an author who had no particular trouble switching
from Macedonian to English. If as a playwright he was more an migr than
an exile, he was, one could say, in a self-chosen exile from his native language,
at least for a while. In 2006 he wrote again a play in Macedonian, Demonot od
Debar Maalo (The Demon from Debar Maalo), which was promptly produced
in Skopje; it is not on exile but on the post-communist transition, real-estate
speculation, and money-making fever of wild capitalism. Though Stefanovski cannot be classified as an exile according to the strict nomenclature applied in this volume, he has been intellectually and politically part of the wargenerated Yugoslav intellectual and artistic Diaspora; even if he keeps returning to Skopje regularly for short stays and has had a continuous cultural presence there in terms of publications and productions, he has been sharing with
his fellow Serb, Croat, and Bosnian theater exiles a sense of loss that the integrated and pluralist Yugoslav cultural space and its interconnected theater
infrastructure to which he and they once belonged has disappeared.
Similarly, Lszl Vgel, a Hungarian language playwright, novelist, and essayist, dismissed from his job at the drama program of the Novi Sad Television at the beginning of the war, did not join the wave of Hungarians who left
Vojvodina in 199294 because of the war, pauperization, UN sanctions, and
an increasingly hostile Serbian nationalism. He has continued living in Novi
Sad, though he spends more time in Budapest and publishes more in Hungarian publications, benefiting from the cultural opening there after 1989. At
home, he has kept out of public life, especially during and after the 1999
NATO bombing, as his published diary, Exteritorijum, indicates. Stefanovskis
former student, Dejan Dukovski, had his first play Bure baruta (The Powder
Keg; 1996) successfully produced in Skopje and in Belgrade, and this production traveled much abroad, making it possible for him to settle temporarily in
509
Hamburg, away from the turbulence of Macedonian party politics and the
Macedonian-Albanian rift; his plays have been produced in Germany, Denmark, France, and later in Split, Croatia. Now he is again in Skopje, at least for
a while. Dzevad Karahasan, an essayist, playwright and theater scholar, left
Sarajevo under more pressing circumstances, after a year of daily mortal
danger and continuous depravation, chronicled in his Dnevnik selidbe (1994).
He lived in Berlin, Graz, and Gttingen, but started to return regularly to Sarajevo after the war to teach and publish.
Like Vgel, many authors, directors, dramaturgs, and actors were caught
during the 1990s in a sort of internal exile, opposing the war, militant
nationalism, and the political forces in power, shunning public life as if their
appearance would mean some tacit approval of the prevailing politics. At the
same time, some of them have felt banished from Europe and the rest of the
world, isolated by the UN sanctions against Serbia that affected cultural and
academic relations; they have been suffering from repression and living in
fear as Kosovo Albanians did until the 1999 NATO intervention, and as the
few remaining Serbs still do in the handful of enclaves in Kosovo. Many have
resented being kept away from most of Europe by the restrictive EU visa regime, which applies to most of the Yugoslav successor states and their
citizens. Displacements within the borders of the former Yugoslavia became
important: individual artists moved from Belgrade to Zagreb and Ljubljana,
from Zagreb to Belgrade, from Sarajevo to Ljubljana and Zagreb, from Cetinje to Zagreb and from other places to other destinations, resisting nationalist homogenization, fearing discrimination due to them not belonging to the
majority ethnic group, or seeking to avoid war, violence, and forced mobilization.
8. Excursions, not Returns

Those who went abroad from former Yugoslavia in 1991 and afterwards remained attached with many emotional, social, and professional ties to the cultural world from which they departed. In most cases, leaving did not mean
cutting all the institutional ties, and over the years some temporarily severed
ties have been renewed, new relations have been established, and new professional opportunities have emerged. The post-Yugoslav theater exile was
prompted by the 199195 war, but the exiles reacted to all significant punctuating events that followed and to the altered circumstances they caused: the
1999 NATO bombing and the practical (if not de jure) secession of Kosovo
from Serbia; the toppling of the Milosevic regime in Serbia in 2000; the end of
510
the Tud-man era in Croatia in 2001; the 2001 Ohrid Agreements ending the
Albanian guerilla upraising in Macedonia; the 2006 declaration of independence by Montenegro and Kosovos self-declared independence in 2008. All
these political changes during a more than fifteen years period have altered
the cultural constellations and professional opportunities, and have limited as
well as enlarged the communication channels available among the successor
states and with their exilic communities. Trains have started running again
across some new frontiers, airlines resumed flights, economic, political, and
cultural ties were re-established among the successor states, visa regimes softened or were even abolished. All these changes had an impact on the attitudes and behavior of those who left and watched these developments from
abroad.
Now that the war has ended, several ex-Yugoslav theater professionals living and working abroad are initiating projects that reconnect them with the
theater infrastructure they once left. While working as programmer in Cardiff s Chapter and then in Hamburgs Kampnagel, Gordana Vnuk kept running every spring the Zagreb Eurokaz festival and has initiated collaborative
projects among ex-Yugoslav colleagues, culminating in a complex program
package for the 2007 Eurokaz that highlights the historic and mythic dimensions of J.B. Tito in five different productions. She has succeeded in initiating
a series of international co-productions because she was outside Zagreb and
Croatia, and because she was running this project from Hamburg, deploying
the Kampnagel production resources. Some components were performed in
other countries but the most confrontational was the presentation of the entire package in Zagreb a cultural-political gesture opposing the systematic
derision of Tito that has marked the Croatian public discourse since independence. Now she is back in Zagreb.
Nada Kokotovic and Nedjo Osman went from Cologne to the Belgrade
Center for Cultural Decontamination to stage Heiner Mllers Hamletmaschine
and Medea respectively. Vesna Stanisic, who became a Swedish language playwright and dramaturg in exile, initiated a three-year-long project between
Swedish and Serbian theaters for children and their professionals, seeking to
upgrade this theater segment in her former country. Director Milos Lazin,
who left Belgrade and settled in Paris before the war, kept returning to Zagreb, Sarajevo, Mostar, and Osijek to work as theater director and pedagogue.
Mira Erceg, who lived between Berlin and Belgrade even before the outbreak
of the war, continued to return from her Berlin domicile to Belgrade to direct.
Belgrade actors Snezana Bogdanovic and Uliks Fehmiu, and producer Milena
Trobozic Garfield, returned from New York to Belgrade in 2004 to produce
and perform thirty times in a row The Graduate, a well-known film repackaged
511
now for the stage and running every evening for an entire month an entrepreneurial novelty against the routines of the Belgrade theaters with their rotating repertory.
Behind these artists, all well known and accomplished even before they
went into exile, there is an army of performing-arts students that also left the
country with the war, but without diplomas, credits on the CV, and networks,
thus generally unable to pursue theater careers. Together with other post-YU
exiles not connected to the performing arts, they could rely on many invisible
and yet crucial networks that have been established in the early 1990s, providing comfort, help, support, with Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, and Stockholm
as the key hubs. Exiles could also rely in these cities on the ex-Yugoslavs who
settled there before the war. These inter-ethnic and inter-generational networks have been marked by the rejection of violence, war, and nationalism.
Many students who interrupted their studies in order to go abroad could continue studying thanks to the support of a worldwide emergency grant program that George Soros Open Society Institute provided in 19932000, and
grants offered by the UAF in the Netherlands, the WUS in Austria, and other
generous provisions. Jasenko Selimovic started studying at the Sarajevo Academy of Scenic Arts and came in 1992 to Stockholm as a refugee. He joined by
chance the production of Sarajevo, Tales of a City, prepared by Intercult for the
opening of the Antwerp European Cultural Capital 93. Selimovic subsequently completed his studies at the Drama Institute in Stockholm, directed a
few productions, and became the director of the Municipal Theater in Gteborg. Later he worked with several other Nordic companies and for the drama
programs of the Swedish television and radio.
In a few instances, the new post-YU Diaspora was highlighted in small festivals held in Amsterdam, Vienna, Stockholm, Berlin, and Mlheim a.d. Ruhr.
In these and some other instances, cultural organizations in Western Europe
created events that grouped exiles dispersed in Europe and connected them
with their peers and colleagues who came from some of the successor states.
These were precious occasions to catch up with each other, check on turbulent developments, and gain new insights, both on exile and on the culturalpolitical conditions in ex-Yugoslavia (Klaic, Reconnecting in Ruhr). Vienna
Theater G.m.b.H sought to reconnect separated ex-Yugoslav theater realms
by organizing a competition in 2001 for new plays from the region. The result,
two volumes of plays (Olof), stimulated in the German speaking theater an interest in new post-Yugoslav dramas.
512
9. In the Internet Exile

What characterized this specific exile wave was the rapid development of
e-mail and internet. Post-Yugoslavs or ex-Yugoslavs, dispersed over several
continents, are among the first cyber-exiles; communication among them,
and with those who stayed in the countries of former Yugoslavia has been
greatly facilitated and accelerated through the new technology, affecting not
just the exchange of news and personal messages but also the circulation of
cultural products, made at home and in exile, of plays, reviews, photos, music,
video snippets of new productions, polemics, and blogs. For the first time, a
generation of well educated exile artists had instantaneous access to huge
amounts of information about the territory and cultural constellation they left
behind, and about cultural developments in areas where their fellow exiles
reside. Online libraries enable exiles to access cultural goods left behind and
to share their own creation with many, as if they still disposed of a tightly knit
social and artistic circle they once enjoyed at home. Actually, with the arrival
of the internet, some of the most stereotypical assumptions about the nature
of exile, such as isolation, loneliness, a sense of disconnectedness, and acculturation, need to be re-examined. They have not been made altogether irrelevant by the cyber-communication boom but certainly diminished and modified, at least among the better educated exiles and those residing in the cities
with a concentration of post-Yugoslav intellectuals. This new exile group did
not set up publishing houses and magazines (except for the three issues of the
review Erewhon that Slobodan Blagojevic and Hamdija Demirovic published
in 199293 in Amsterdam) but initiated web pages, e-newsletters, circular
e-mails, later enriched with photos and video clips. The accomplishments of
the performing artists from former Yugoslavia should be seen in conjunction
with the cultural production of their fellow exiles in literature, music, the visual arts (Milica Tomic, Tanja Ostojic, Sejla Kameric ), and film. All the frustrations and difficulties notwithstanding, the exile years have been productive
and creative for many.
Where one resides has become less important, global networks connect
artists, cultural organizations and platforms, and the cyber communication
among them is steady and intensive. One hardly gets lost, disappear, and drop
in the black hole of exilic isolation and despair. Internet offers telephone
books of virtually all countries and cities. Those who think they disappeared
in the anonymity of exile will be soon traced, reconnected with fellow exiles,
with friends left behind and with many other artists who also live a nomadic
existence by choice, more as expats then as exiles. With Skype and other
VOIP systems, the exilic dialogue is a matter of familiar voices and faces vis-
513
ible online, dissecting distances and making them less important. The internet
search engines are powerful integrators of dispersed exilic communities, and
individual artistic careers, punctuated by exile, regain their virtual continuity
in the long lists of web pages Google produces on the computer screen if one
searches for a particular name. In fact, Google helped reconstruct dozens of
artistic careers, discussed in this chapter. If previous generations of exiles
mourned their private libraries left behind and their papers and art works lost
in many moves, dispersed among former residences and left in various
shelters and warehouses, todays exiles may calmly remark: My homeland is
my laptop! Of course, laptops do crash, fall, and get stolen, but Goran Stefanovski, as many others, travels with his entire oeuvre safely stored on his
USB stick, including his scripts, essays, and plays (and probably photos of
their past stagings). Many exile writers, photographers, visual artists,
composers, or directors keep their own oeuvre in the cyberspace, stored in
some of the virtual warehouses, such as gmail with its comfortable capacity of
6 Gb and accessibility from wherever one can get online. Exiles are not
necessarily dispossessed of their own artistic or intellectual opus, as the historic exiles often were.
10. Exiles as Mediators

Thanks to the internet, the flow of cultural products from home to abroad
has also increased. The presence of many theater exiles in Western Europe
and North America increased the circulation abroad, the foreign translations,
and, eventually, the publication and staging of plays by the ex-Yugoslav authors who did not emigrate. The performing artists in exile have become cultural intermediaries, facilitating the circulation of plays from former Yugoslavia, translating them or finding translators for them, occasionally staging
them or urging others to do so. Since the 1990s, the translations of such plays,
and of the number of authors involved perceptibly increased. Most of these
non-exiles are young authors who became active in the years of the war or
even afterwards; the proportion of women among them is very high, most
come from the university playwriting programs in Belgrade, Zagreb, and
Skopje. Most translations are into English and from there often further into
other languages, but the translations into French and German have also become more numerous in comparison with the decade before 1991. There are,
for instance, some seventy plays of ex-Yugoslav authors written after 1991
that are translated into French (www.troisiemebureau.com/3d/regards_
croises/data/biblio.pdf). This wave initiated also the translation of many
514
plays written before the war in the territory of former Yugoslavia, including
classics by Miroslav Krleza and Branislav Nusic.
eljko
Theater exiles have become cultural mediators and promoters. Z
Djukic graduated in theater directing from Belgrade, went to the US for graduate studies, and stayed there because of the outbreak of the war. He established his theater TUTA (The Utopian Theater Asylum) in Washington, D.C.
and later in Chicago, where after several successful productions of Brecht,
Handke, Heiner Mueller, and Aristophanes he directed two new Belgrade
plays, Ugljesa Sajtinacs Hadersfild in 2006 and Milena Markovic Sine (Tracks;
2006, revived in 2007), designed by his partner Natasa Vucurovic. The nonrealistic, non-psychological, and non-linear approach of both plays, as well as
their powerful evocation of youth crushed by war and violence, caught the attention of the Chicago critics. They were acknowledged as fine plays, but
without Djukic in all probability they would never have reached the Chicago
stage. Much as exiles habitually provide the core audience, the successful run
would only be possible with an appeal to the usual American theater audience.
Milos Lazin, in Paris since 1989, directed in 1996 in CDN de Montluon Htel
Europe, his own adaptation of the novel La Neige et les chiens (The Snow and the
Dogs) by Vidosav Stevanovic, a Belgrade author, at the time a Paris exile, who
later went to Sarajevo and lives now in his native village near Kragujevac, Serbia. Subsequently, Lazin used his French network to set up a complex international co-production of Ines & Denise by the Zagreb author Slobodan
Snajder. He directed it and toured in 199799 with this bilingual production
of his company Mappa Mundi in France and Bosnia. In 2007 he directed Zena
bomba (Woman Bomb) by the young Croat author Ivana Sajko, taking it to
Rennes, Paris, Orleans, and Le Mans. Snajder never left Zagreb, but his plays
Zmijski svlak (La Dpouille du serpent; 1994) and Hrvatski Faust (Le Faust
Croate; 1982) were subsequently translated and published in France. Quite a
anina Mirfew foreign productions of plays by Maja Pelevic, Ivana Sajko, Z
cevska, Dusan Kovacevic, Matjaz Zupancic, Milena Markovic, and Asja
Srnec-Todorovic, and several other playwrights who are not in exile, should
be credited to the efforts, attention, and direct involvement of ex-Yugoslav
theater exiles.
An encounter of playwrights from former Yugoslavia that Milos Lazin organized in Sarajevo in 2000 brought thirty participants together, and resulted
in the publication of the anthology De lAdriatique la mer Noire (2001) in
France. Sava Andjelkovic from the Slavic Department of the Sorbonne
launched a series of conferences of French and ex-Yugoslav theater scholars
that took place since 2003 in Paris, Cetinje-Podgorica, Zagreb, and Sarajevo,
leading to the essay collection Le thtre daujourdhui en Bosnie-Herzgovine,
515
Croatie, Serbie et au Montngro, Nationalisme et autisme (2006). The Maison de

lOrient et de l Europe in Paris and its publishing arm Lespace dun instant
brought out in French some twelve books of plays by ex-Yugoslav authors.
Exiles created a receptive infrastructure and shaped an economy of attention
for plays by authors who stayed in the countries of former Yugoslavia. They
have been often directly involved in the translations, publications and foreign
production of those plays.
It is difficult to judge how much the strong breakthrough of the Belgrade
author Biljana Srbljanovic into the international repertory could be ascribed
to this exilic infrastructure of attention and support. Her success has been
formidable: according to Milos Lazin (A quoi tient le succs de Biljana
Srbljanovic?) she had more than 130 professional productions abroad since
1997 and has surpassed the total number of foreign productions of all authors
who ever lived on the territory of the ex-Yugoslavia, including Branislav
Nusic, Aleksandar Popovic, Ljubomir Simovic, Dusan Kovacevic, Slobodan
Snajder, Dusan Jovanovic, Goran Stefanovski, who all had more than twenty
foreign productions each. For Srbljanovic success the presentation of her
plays at the Bonner Biennale was particularly important, for it brought her
early plays Beogradska trilogija (The Belgrade Trilogy; 1997) and Porodicne price
(Family Stories; 1998) to the attention of many critics, dramaturgs, directors,
and translators, who congregated at this festival of new European plays. That
those and her subsequent plays quickly entered the international repertory
could also be explained by a new curiosity about Balkan culture and its contemporary cultural production that has emerged around or despite the ravages of war and the related profound social collapse and moral impasse.
Srbljanovics success facilitated also the foreign production of other playwrights from Belgrade, Zagreb, Ljubljana, and Skopje.
Though there is no causal connection between the efforts of the post-Yugoslav theater exiles and Srbljanovics international success, there is behind
this individual breakthrough a complex dialectic of artistic exile and domestic
artistic production, another indication of interdependence and connectivity
between home and abroad, often shaped in a form of a collaborative relationship. In Beogradska trilogija Srbljanovic was the first to foreground in drama the
massive exodus of urban youth from Serbia, the unprecedented brain drain
that a few generations will not be able to balance, and the new exilic enclaves
of Toronto, Sidney, Oakland, New Zealand, with their schizophrenic subculture. She set this new exile as a theme of the post-Yugoslav domestic and exilic cultural production, but it did not become an issue of public debates in
former Yugoslavia, and in her subsequent plays she moved to other topics,
avoiding to be pigeonholed as an author of exile. Ironically, ten years and sev-
516
eral plays later, she herself lives both in Paris and Belgrade as an uneasy, irritable commentator of post-Milosevic Serbia and of the exile his politics once
prompted. She fuses the career of an internationally acclaimed and much produced author with that of a teacher of new domestic playwrights at the Belgrade Faculty of Dramatic Arts, acting as a mobile and polemic columnist and
blogger, a part-time expat. Lazin has argued in his articles that her success and
that of her even younger colleagues from the post-Yugoslav states derive
from their ability to write in the currently prevailing dramaturgical modes.
They eschew previous models of historic drama, appropriate to the recent
nationalist euphoria (Nikcevic).
11. Reconstruction and Normalization

After 2001, more ambitious reconstructive projects became possible, bringing the exiles together and in professional relationship with those who did not
leave their country. Most important of these is the Theater Ulysses, founded
by the ex-Zagreb (now Los Angeles) actor Rade Serbedzija and Zagreb
author Borislav Vujicic. In the National Park of the Brioni archipelago that
once was Titos secluded Adriatic resort, Serbedzija and Vujicic set out to develop summer theater seasons. From King Lear in 2001 onward, they premiered one new production each summer and continued performing some
old productions as well. The performances are given mostly in the ruins of an
ancient Austro-Hungarian fortress on the uninhabited Mali Brijun island,
whereas the audience is transported over by boat from the nearby port of Fazana. In this pastoral environment, loaded with symbolism, most performing
artists come from Zagreb, Rijeka, and Split, as well as from some other parts
of former Yugoslavia. The musicians of the Mostarska Simfonieta and the
singers Putokazi come from Mostar, led by the Edinburgh composer Nigel
Osborne. Some who went into exile come here to work: for instance. Lenka
Udovicki, Rade Serbedzija and Mira Furlan from Los Angelos, Aleksandar
Cvjetkovic from Italy, Tomaz Pandur from Madrid, Zijah Sokolovic from
Vienna. In King Lear, Medea, Play Becket, Marat/Sade, Tesla Electric Company, and
other productions they reconstructed some of the cooperative ties and artistic
relationships broken in 1991, and included a younger generation that was too
young to partake in the dynamics of mobility and cooperation in the prewar
Yugoslav theater. Some of the Brijuni productions were shown in Zagreb and
at some festivals in the ex-Yugoslav countries, including Bitef in Belgrade.
This new practice signals a sort of post-war normalization, as do the guest
appearances of Slovene, Croat, Bosnian, Macedonian, Montenegrin, and Ser-
517
bian companies in the cities that now lie for them abroad. Initially, these were
eagerly awaited and deeply emotional events, with tumultuous applause, loads
of flowers, and much tears, marking the family reunion among professionals
that were separated for years by the war and its aftermath, and also between the
performers and their loyal audiences. Gradually, they have become if not too
frequent then fairly normal occurrences. In the follow-up phase, repertory
companies have been engaging guest actors and directors from across the new
borders, and festivals have included in their juries old colleagues who have in
the meantime become foreign citizens; critics cover the premieres across the
recently drawn borders. On the eve of 2008, Katarina Pejovic, once a Belgrade
dramaturg, for years already settled in Zagreb after living in the US and in
Ljubljana, has returned for a few weeks to Belgrade to work as a dramaturg in
the Atelje 212, alongside Dusan Jovanovic, a Ljubljana theater director doing
his second post-war production in Belgrade. They staged a new adaptation of
what was an Atelje 212 hit thirty-five years ago: Uloga moje porodice u svetskoj revoluciji (The Role of My Family in the World Revolution; 1970) by the ex-Belgrade author Bora Cosic, now a Berlin resident. A family reunion of sorts.
These gestures follow the slow and hesitant improvement of political relations among the successor states of former Yugoslavia, whereby cultural
openings follow the re-establishment of economic relations and bring re-integration of cultural systems, cultural production and distribution chains that
were even before 1991 autonomous but interconnected in the decentralized
cultural setup of the federal Yugoslavia. The reconnection has no exclusively
Yugoslav character but is enhanced by a positive reframing of political and cultural cooperation in the Balkans, some curiosity for the neighbors, in the Balkans as well as in Europe. In fact, this new dynamics reduces the importance of
the new borders drawn since 1991, up to the recent Montenegro independence
since theater professionals increasingly see themselves as players in a dynamic,
integrated, and inclusive European cultural space. Not as equal players for sure,
and not all professionals there are still many who feel they need to defend
their national culture from all sorts of real and fictitious menaces, who see their
native language as a shield protecting endangered identity and identify European integration with cultural standardization and a general dumbing down.
12. The Fading of Exile

In 2008, Croat wines and Slovene food are widely available in Belgrade stores,
but books published in Zagreb do not make it to the Belgrade bookstores, or
from Belgrade to Zagreb. Sarajevo remains a privileged territory where both
518
are available but are quite expensive for most potential readers. Explanations
of those paradoxes are supported by implausible economic arguments, not
political ones. And the status differences among the new states (and thus of
the opportunities of their citizens, artists not exempted) cannot be ignored:
Slovenia is a member state of the EU, Croatia and Macedonia are official candidate members but with an uncertain accession schedule; Serbia, Bosnia &
Herzegovina, Macedonia, and Montenegro are not even candidates, while
Kosovos status is much debated and remains disputed after the declaration of
independence in 2008. Consequently, the welfare, mobility, and creative opportunities of artists in ex-Yugoslav states are unequal; artists in Kosovo are
most isolated and most dependent on international donors to patch up an inadequate, long neglected cultural infrastructure.
None of the successor states has altered much its performing-arts system..
They are still dominated by repertory theater companies, and even the newly
established producing organizations follow mainly the repertory model with
steady ensemble and staff. Such companies are as a rule quite immobile, and
their touring is cumbersome and expensive. Aesthetic notions and practices
have not yet diverged far from each other, although Ljubljana might have another stage style than Belgrade, and Belgrade a different one from Zagreb.
Ljubljana, Zagreb, Belgrade, and Skopje each have an alternative scene of
uneven importance and visibility, while Bosnia & Herzegovina and Montenegro have practically none. That those divergences are not substantial is shown
when exiled colleagues return to work as actors, directors, designers, or authors, and fit in without much trouble. The input of exiles is individual, it does
not induce a substantially different energy or vision in the existing theater
constellation at home. If anything, the exiles got used to higher standards of
professional discipline than what some rep companies are able to provide, so
when they go back for a project, they need to develop some mode of cohabitation with the prevailing professional and institutional routines and standards.
Those who left since 1991, even if once marked as traitors (see Panovski),
tend to stay in their new worldwide domicile, even if they occasionally return
to some theater endeavors in ex-Yugoslavia, and they are being joined by a
newer generation of performing artists and authors seeking to become
migrs and expatriates in Western Europe and North America, driven by
their search for professional opportunities rather than by some pressing
political motivations. Some have started writing plays in English, though they
still live in Belgrade and Zagreb. Their departure, real or imminent, is part of a
steady brain drain, enhanced by globalization and reinforced by the European
integration.
519
A generation of theater artists resented nationalism but could not prevent

the war, neither as artists nor as citizens; so many of them went with revulsion
into exile, and their dispersion mirrored the disintegration of the country (see
Medenica). Those who found ways to feel more or less at home as exiles in
Berlin, Amsterdam, Los Angeles, or Toronto have no special difficulties adjusting to Belgrade, Zagreb, Ljubljana, Sarajevo, or Skopje as some kind of
new abroad, where they come as visitors, expatriates, or short-term Gastarbeiters.
In a globalized world of accelerated and intensified flow of people, products, and creative ideas, in a Europe that seeks to affirm a common public
space to match a functioning unified market, in the Balkan that compensates
its contentious memories with innovative cooperative practices, post-Yugoslav artistic exile loses some of its specific markers. Some of its stern and rigid
attitudes are fading and thus exile blends into the regional cultural conditions
that have by and large remained unaltered still permeated by a certain dosage of staunch and aggressive nationalism that resists cultural decontamination, propping up institutional models resilient to change, and cultural policies that refuse efforts to update them and make them more effective. But if
the prevailing conditions of cultural production remain locked in some anachronistic patterns and structural poverty, the rhetoric of Europe also creeps in,
and the dynamics of economic globalization alters urban life and consumer
habits. The gap between home and exile gets narrower, edges are blunted, and
theater exiles thus occasionally fit in the infrastructure whose old habits and
mechanisms they still know quite well, not as subversive elements nor as reformers but as appreciated and welcome talents. What started as artistic exile,
driven by anti-war and anti-nationalist politics, seems to be transforming into
prevailing artistic nomadism, into a pattern of mobility based on shifting cooperative partnership and quickly changing points of infrastructural support:
a studio here, a theater there, one festival or another in this city and then in
that one, in one country or another, a grant, a workshop, a residence, a coproduction here, there, anywhere. Clearly, it is a European and not specifically post-Yugoslav cultural practice, one that is neither home nor abroad but
maneuvers through temporary zones of creativity and short-term platforms
of public exposure. Without nostalgia and cynicism, mobility is in, and recent
exile is out, pass, diffused, relegated to cultural memory, and turned into a
dignified subject of scholarly research.
The author acknowledges the generous help and nuanced criticism of numerous fellow exiles in completing this chapter, and especially of Milos Lazin.
520
Works Cited
Andjelkovic, Sava and Paul-Louis Thomas, ed. Le thtre daujourdhui en Bosnie-Herzgovine,
Croatie, Serbie et au Montngro. Nationalisme et autism. Revue des tudes slaves. 77.12 (2006).
Blamaza nacionalnog teatra. Danas (Belgrade), January 26, 2006.
Cosic, Bora. Uloga moje porodice u svetskoj revoluciji (The Role of My Family in the World Revolution). Belgrade: author, 1970.
Furlan, Mira. A Letter to my Co-Citizens. 1991. Performing Arts Journal 18.2 (1996): 2024.
Karahasan, Dzevad. Dnevnik selidbe (Diary of a Move). Zagreb: Dureux, 1994.
Klaic, Dragan. Reconnecting in Ruhr. Theater 2 (1993): 11215.
Klaic, Dragan. Theater in Crisis? The Theater of Crisis. Theater in Crisis? Ed. Maria Delgado and Caridad Swich. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2002. 14459.
Lazin, Milos. Otkud uspeh Biljane Srbljanovic? (What Makes Biljana Srbljanovic successful?) 50 godina Sterijinog pozorja (50 years of Sterijino Pozorje). Scena & Teatron (2005): 2544.
Lazin, Milos. La nouvelle criture thtrale des Balkans et dailleurs. Cahier de thtre Jeu nr.
120 (September 2006): 7076.
Lazin, Milos. A quoi tient le succs de Biljana Srbljanovic? (What Makes Biljana Srbljanovic successful). Andjelkovic and Thomas 21743.
Luzina, Jelena. A Unique Theatre Miracle: Thirty-five Years of the Romany Pralipe Theatre (19712006). Trans. Rajna Koska Hot. Identities. Journal for Politics, Gender, and Culture (Skopje) 4.89 (2005): 27994.
Markovic, Milena. Sine (Tracks). In Tri drame (Three Plays [Sine, Paviljoni, Brod za lutke]).
Belgrade: LOM, 2002.
Medenica, Ivan. Un thtre dsintgr limage de son pays? LEst dsorient. Alternatives
thtrales (Brussels) nr. 64 (2000): 54.
Nikcevic, Sanja. Historical Plays in Search or National Identity in Croatian Theatre
Today. Slavic and East European Performances (New York) 17.2 (1997).
Olof, Klaus Detlef, and Kollektiv Theater G.m.b.H, ed. Stcke (Plays). 2 vols. Vienna: Folio,
2002.
Panovski, Naum. New Old Times in the Balkans: The Search for a Cultural Identity. Performing Arts Journal 28.2 (2006): 6174.
Sajtinac, Ugljesa. Hadersfild. Belgrade: Jugoslovensko dramsko pozoriste, 2005.
Snajder, Slobodan. Zmijski svlak 1994. Trans. Mireille Robin as La Dpouille du serpent. Paris:
Lespace dun instant, 2002.
Snajder, Slobodan. Le Faust Croate (The Croatian Faust). Paris: L espace dun instant, 2005.
Trans. Mireille Robin of Hrvatski Faust. Zagreb: Prolog, 1982.
Srbljanovic, Biljana. Beogradska trilogija (The Belgrade Trilogy). Scena 34 (1996): 162185.
Srbljanovic, Biljana. Porodicne price (Family Stories). Scena 34 (1998): 106127. English
trans. Vida Jankovic Scena, English language edition 18 (19992000): 3857.
Stojanoska, Ana. Intracultural Theatrical Dispersion or On Recent Macedonian Theatrical
Matters. Intercultural Theater. Ed. Jelena Luzina. Skopje: Institut za teatrologija FDU,
2005.
Stefanovski, Goran. Sarajevo (Tales from a City). Performing Arts Journal 16.2 (1994):
5386.
Vegel, Laslo. Exteritorijum. Trans. Arpad Vicko. Belgrade: Stubovi culture, 2003.
Losing Touch, Keeping in Touch, Out of Touch (Sndor Hites)
521
Losing Touch, Keeping in Touch, Out of Touch:

The Reintegration of Hungarian Literary
Exile after 1989
Sndor Hites
To begin with I recall two events as allegories of Hungarian literary exile in the
second half of the twentieth century. The first relates to the 194449 wave of
migrs, the second to that of 1956. Both represent notions and experiences
of a return.
Lszl Cs. Szab, a well-known essayist of the 193040s, was aware of the
approaching communist takeover; he left for Italy in 1948 and settled later in
England. In exile he enjoyed the highest reputation as critical authority, organizer, and spokesman. Among the later migrs and those few domestic
scholars and writers who were luckily allowed to visit England during the
Kdr era it became costmary to pay ones respect to him in his solitary London flat. Cs. Szab strictly opposed cooperation with the communist authorities, even when they initiated contacts in the late 1960s to get some recognition for the regime. After decades of absence, and years of informal
preparation by the influential writer Gyula Illys, Cs. Szab eventually visited
Budapest in 1980, on the stipulation that some of his works be published and
he could give a lecture at the Academy of Fine Arts, where he used to lecture
on art history. Facing a crowded classroom, Cs. Szab opened his lecture with
the ironic remark: As I said in my last class. Alluding to a lecture thirty-two
years earlier, he insisted on both the possibility and the absurdity of restoring
continuity with the pre-communist era, probably not merely on a personal
level.
Cs. Szabs attitude may be generalized insofar as the self-image of the
194449 exiles continued to adhere to a virtually frozen domestic perspective,
no matter how much they differed from each other in all respects. For them,
going home meant resuming what had been interrupted; if some of them admitted that Hungary is not what they were familiar with, they also realized that
we are not the very same either (Kovcs 4). However, a belief in continuity
could be sustained only as long as official exclusion could be blamed for its
522
absence. Cs. Szab died in 1984 during a Budapest visit. Had he lived to see
the 1990s, he might have agreed with Gyula Borbndi, another prominent exiled man of letters in Munich, who admitted in 1996 that he never thought
that geographical distance from people at home would create such a gap between their views (Kldetsem 92).
The political exclusion of exiles was terminated in 1989, but new problems
emerged, especially for those who left in 1956 and started their literary career
in exile. Lszl Mrton, a co-founder of the prominent Parisian exile literary
journal Magyar Muhely (MM), entered the domestic literary scene with a collection of short stories, and subsequently announced in 1992 his long-felt
wish that his namesake in Budapest, the novelist Lszl Mrton, should use a
pen name to avoid confusion (Trvnyen kvl). An article by Borbndi,
editor of the periodical j Lthatr (L) in Munich, supported his case, for it
broached the subject of namesakes at home and abroad (Nvazonossgok).
The domestic Lszl Mrton was much younger but ranked among the most
promising novelists. Refusing the demand, he claimed in an interview with
Lajos Mrton Varga titled Who is the real Lszl Mrton? that he had priority for he had already published his books years before his Parisian namesake
managed to release in 1989 his first publication in Hungary. Answering under
the same title, the ex-exile Mrton recalled that he had appeared in exilic
journals and anthologies. He felt especially offended that the other Mrton
questioned his literary credentials. Bitterly complaining that his namesake
considered him non-existent, and his claim as an external threat, he concluded that former migrs remained outlaws. The Parisian Mrton
brought the case to court, whereas domestic writers and intellectuals defended the domestic Mrton and joined a press campaign, imploring the Parisian in a private letter to abandon his claim. The case ended with an out-ofcourt settlement that stipulated that each must add something distinctive to
his name in journal publications. The 1993 edition of the New Hungarian Literary Encyclopedia distinguished the two authors but still mixed up some of
their publications.
Theoretically, controversies of this kind can easily be solved by convention.
However, in this peculiar case the rule was hard to apply. The exilic Mrton
was known only within very small circles in Hungary, but justifiably he regarded the criterion of book publication in Hungary a sophistry, since exiles
could not publish in the country. He rightly claimed also that his publications
in exilic periodicals and anthologies should be regarded as presence in what
migrs were keen to call global Hungarian culture, even if he was not
allowed to publish in Hungary. In a sense, the incident revealed that introducing migr authors in Hungary led to a collision of two distinct although in-
523
terrelated Hungarian literatures. The extreme case of the homonyms emblematized the collision. The exilic Mrton represented those who had to wait
for decades to make their debut in their homeland, whereas the domestic one
spoke, if only unwittingly, for those who necessarily considered themselves
the genuine Hungarian literature because they had little information about
the ones abroad. Notice that the exilic Mrton had next to his fellow MM editors also Borbndis backing: those who were at odds, or even hostile to each
other during their exile years, often joined forces when they returned. Similarly, those who asked him to yield to his domestic namesake were exclusively
domestic intellectuals; it represented a well-mannered but clear unity against a
former migr which the latter uniformly resented.
The Mrton vs. Mrton case created little public stir, but may be treated as
an allegory of exclusion. The domestic Mrton became one of the main
novelists on the Hungarian scene, while his exilic namesake, who moved
home in 1994, remained an active contributor to the press and has recently
published a biography of Arthur Koestler, thus moving away from fiction
writing. The incident may have helped weaken his ambition and struggle to
become a writer, a struggle that preoccupied all the young literati of 1956:
they were rather unknown at home when leaving and had difficulty in getting recognition even after 1990. The title short story of Mrtons Lgiposta
(Airmail/Mail from Heaven) may indicate, next to doubts about his own talent, a complaint common among exiles writers that they get no responses. It
could be also taken as his anticipation of the later controversy. When the
narrator, a neurotic writer, gets no reactions to his works, he suspects a global conspiracy against him. His stream-of-consciousness monologue, punctured by brutal sexual desires, by allusions to a father complex, and by references to Jewish fate in twentieth century, ends when he receives a letter with
characters cut out of a paper, probably self-written: Seeking advice, eh? Or
some direction? Theres none, all run out of it there. You cannot even properly finish off your own story, you moron leave all this, leave it, shut up.
Are you still unable to keep your mouth shut ? That was their message (21).
1. Closely Watched Connections

A history of Hungarian literary exile in the second half of the twentieth-century could be depicted as a series of misunderstandings and misconceptions.
After 1989, when the motives for going into emigration were gone, the problem did not get resolved, and in a way its irresolvable character came to light.
524
The post-45 exiles and migrs were in a double bind from the very beginning. They declared their independence from or hostility towards the communist regime, even if they happened to have been devoted Party members, as
it was not that rare among the 56ers. Yet, Hungary never ceased to be the
focus of their attention and ambition, in contrast to other East-European
exile writers and some Hungarian migrs from the interwar period, like the
Polnyi-brothers, the classical scholar Kroly Kernyi, the political journalist
Ferenc Fejto, or the humorist writer George Mikes, who all became successful
on the international scene. Those who left between 1944 and 1949 were
mostly convinced, for various reasons, that literary exile would substitute for
Hungarian culture, which was oppressed at home. In the 1950s many held
that Hungarian literature itself emigrated. Those 1956ers who had already had
a literary career at home also adopted this approach, declaring in the headline
of the first issue of Irodalmi jsg on March 15, 1957 that it was to represent
the writers of an exiled nation.
In the 1960s, particularly when the young 56ers with literary ambitions
came forward, making exile literature even more multilayered, this ideology of
substitution faded or became less attractive. The editors of MM, whose avantgarde orientation was already a provocation to many, urged several times the
admission that exile can only make a limited contribution to the big picture,
and the domestic scene will never cease to be the genuine home of Hungarian literature. Other young exiles of 1956 also tried to detach their literary
ambitions from political standpoints. As Endre Kartson suggested answering a questionnaire by the I, it makes no sense to turn literature into a means
of political struggle aiming to liberate the homeland, for a work would thus
become a monument of that struggle and lose its specific literary character.
In the late 1960s, as the Kdr regime consolidated its power and the hope of
an imminent political solution vanished, the exiles came to realize that their
absence will be lasting. Hence harsh disputes emerged in the L in 196769
over the question whether, and if so how, to start a dialogue with people at
home.
Though migr literati could rely on their own quite well developed network of periodicals and publishers, their ultimate aim was to publish in Hungary. Although some of Sndor Mrais, Lajos Zilahys, Gyozo Hatrs work
was translated, and Kriszta Arnthy, gota Kristf and a handful of other
writers decided to change language, Cs. Szab must have expressed a fairly
common view by asking the migrs to continue to write for their fellow Hungarians and not for the English, the American, the French, the Germans or
the Swedes (Mg vagyunk 29). Their desires and efforts to gain or regain
domestic audience, or to have at least some response, were enhanced by the
525
indifference of the Hungarian Diaspora. Exilic journals had to cope with constant financial problems for the lack of patrons. Most writers resorted to selfpublication with subscribers. They came to realize that they would never have
a proper audience unless they get home, at least via their writings.
Craving for publishing at home found a new ideology when in the 1970s
the opening dialogue with the home-folks converted the notion of substitution into correction. The exiles intended to follow attentively, and, as far as
possible, to influence the homelands cultural and political life, in order to
correct what they considered communisms distortions in taste, historical
consciousness, and public opinion. Despite their deep disagreements, they
tacitly agreed that the exile is to keep up values and measures discredited or
pushed into the background at home. As Cs. Szab envisaged at a 1975 Netherlands conference titled Hungarian Literature in the West, the migr efforts should lead to an intellectual blood transfusion back home. The concept of correction was expressed in the profile of the exile periodicals as well:
L and I took up the cause in the political-historical sense, MM in the aesthetical-poetical one.
This ambition was based upon the conviction that exilic literature was, in
contrast to the one at home, authentic, because it was free of political constraints. The other source of the migr commitment, as ron Kibdi Varga
expounded it, was to consider Hungarian culture genuinely oriented toward
the West, an orientation temporarily surrendered in communist Hungary but
still held up by the migrs. Accordingly, the exiles and the migrs had become part of the West, and could, by virtue of their status, serve as mediators
(Nyugati magyar irodalom). Both arguments held only partially. Though
Hungarian writers abroad did not need to follow what Party authorities said,
personal relations and political biases did influence the Hungarian literary
culture abroad. Patrons had, for instance, an influence on the choices made in
anthologies. As to the second point, a scholar like the Hungarian born but
Western trained Kibdi Varga, who achieved a respectable international career in literary theory, could certainly consider himself Western-minded; but
the majority of migr authors encountered the new trends as readers at best,
without applying it to their art (Kartson, Milyen magyar r lettem 129).
Older generations understandably held on to their earlier orientation, which
in many instances ironically coincided with some views still prevailing at
home. The young 56ers were more receptive to new Western cultural, poetical, and philosophical movements, for they adapted more to their new home.
The MM editors Pl Nagy and Tibor Papp had connections with the Tel Quel
circle and were more open to structuralism and deconstruction than any of
the other exile circles.
526
In pursuit of the mission of correcting things in Hungary, literary exiles

certainly had great achievements, even if their attempts to mediate Hungarian
literature to Western countries met with only limited success. Nevertheless,
they invited Mikls Mszly, Sndor Weres, Mikls Erdly, and other authors maginalized Hungary to deliver lectures at the meetings of the Mikes Kelemen Circle in the Netherlands and the Magyar Muhely Munkakzssg in France.
They also offered the possibility of uncensored but potentially damaging
foreign publication for those who dared. MM published not only the works of
underground authors like Erdly, but also a volume of Weress poetry (1964),
which the author was force to declare in Hungary as unauthorized. They also
reviewed significant works by Lajos Kassk and Mikls Szentkuthy, which
were all but ignored at home. Some texts of the literary tradition that did not
fit into Hungarys cultural policy also appeared in exile. In 1981, Arknum in
Chicago published Attila Jzsef s psychoanalytic diaries, which did not dovetail with the Hungarian view of him as a proletarian poet. Understandably
sensitive to the fact that one third of the Hungarians lived outside the country,
migrs also promoted the cause of the Hungarian minorities in the surrounding countries, an issue ignored or mistreated by official Hungarian
politics. They tried to reach and include in their activities Hungarian writers
from Romania, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia. In return, migrs appeared
in the j Symposion and other minority periodicals in the more liberal Yugoslavia. The most ambitious project gathered Hungarian culture in the motherland, in Diaspora, and in the minority cultures that lived beyond the Versailles
Treaty borders. A triple workshop on these entitled Magyar Mrleg (Hungarian Balance) was held in Switzerland in 197980.
The attitude of the communist authorities toward exile was marked by
somewhat similar tendencies. In the 1950s and early 60s, migrs were treated
within the cold war, as agents of American intelligence services and enemies
of the socialist democracies. Yet short reviews from the middle 1960s onward
gradually revealed more conciliatory approaches, which, to be sure, still
strictly separated political exile from cultural Diaspora. As a sign of easing,
the very designations changed. From the 1970s onward, the label changed
from exilic literature to Hungarian literature in the West. However, a recently recovered secret document of the Publishing Office (Kiadi Foigazgatsg), which dealt with censorial issues, shows that the sporadic critical attention was governed by the Party doctrine that only those authors living
abroad should be given permission to publish at home, who emigrated before
World War II, namely those who fled from the Nazis and not from communism (Tth and Veres 373). This is why the French short stories of Lszl
Dormndi (left in 1938) could appear in translation in 1965.
527
The Anyanyelvi Konferencia (Workshop on the Mother tongue), first held in

1970 in Hungary, was a conciliatory move of the Hungarian officials, but it
was actually one of several publicity attempts to legalize the Kdr regime via
Western migr guests who longed for a recognition at home. Only a select
number of migrs wanted or were allowed to participate. Authorities even
tried to enlist some to report on their fellow exiles, baiting them with promises of publishing, further entry permits, or passport for their relatives. The
Hungarian officials made it clear, however, that nothing would be allowed
that touches on ideological taboos, such as the Soviet subjection, memories
of 56, or the revisions of Versailles Treaty. Cs. Szab cherished hopes of publishing in Hungary through the 1970s, but when he gave an interview to Radio
Free Europe, this was taken off the agenda for a while. The same happened to
Gyrgy Faludy after he published a poem on Kdr in 1981. Some scholarly
works, for instances by Lrnt Czigny or by Kibdi Varga, managed to slip
through somewhat easier, giving a boost to domestic research as well.
Some migrs accepted compromises, others did not. Issues of MM free of
political statements somehow appeared on the open shelves at the National
Szchnyi Library, while other exilic materials were kept in sequestered collections. Mrai refused a publishing offer to him, by making free elections a
condition of his permission; but the popular novelist Lajos Zilahy of the interwar era, who left for the United States in 1947, was republished in Hungary
in the 1970s and enjoyed a great success. He died while planning to move
home. Even Cs. Szab accepted mild censorship to have his essays On the
Greeks (which formed the background of his mentioned 1980 lecture) and
several works be published in Hungary. It must have given him pleasure that,
although ancient Greek culture seemed to be a safe topic, he could slip in
some messages. For instance, he started his opening chapter entitled Spread
out into the world, by defining culture as diasporic in its Greek origins. However, he hurt the sensitivity of his former exilic publisher, Aurora, by remarking that the release of one of his books in Hungary made him feel like a real
writer again.
Others followed, though in limited numbers. The most striking case was
that of Andrs Domahidy, who went in 1956 to Australia. His novels made a
favorable impression on Pter Nagy, an influential literary historian and Party
member, and thus permission was given to release them in the mid 1980s. Domahidys poetically sophisticated way of portraying in Vnasszonyok nyara (Indian Summer; 1969) the fate of aristocrats during the early years of communism, and his stream-of-consciousness analysis of an exilic psyche in rnyak
s asszonyok (Shades and Women; 1979), brought him success as well as critical
attention. Ironically Domahidy became a household name in the Hungarian
528
Diaspora once his novels were published in Hungary: his second novel was
translated and published in Australia in 1989.
With the easing political climate, publishing and republishing gathered
speed. During the 1980s, anthologies of exile poetry, prose, and essays were
simultaneously released by migr and domestic publishing houses. However,
Bla Pomogtss collection Prbeszd Magyarorszggal (Dialogue with Hungary), a volume of studies on touchy historical and political issues, was published only in 1991, after the changeover. Next to the anthologies, a systematic elaboration of exilic literature also started in Hungary. In the fourth part
of the seventh volume (194575) in the Literary History of the Academy,
Mikls Bldi and his co-editors surveyed the minority Hungarian writers of
the surrounding countries under the general title Hungarian literature Abroad,
and they smuggled in a chapter on exile literature. After some delay, the
same scholars came forth with the more comprehensive Hungarian Literature
in the West after 1945. Both volumes attributed excessively painful and nostalgic
emotions to the migrs. Those abroad, strongly criticized the volume for
praising as reasonable those who were reluctant to criticize communism in a
direct way, and for regarding exilic literature merely as an expression of lost
perspectives. Still, it is ironic that a synthesis was only attempted in Hungary;
the migrs themselves did not venture to give a comprehensive picture of
their own achievements.
2. Encounter of an Ambivalent Kind:

Inside and Outside in the 1990s
Most migrs saw in the collapse of communism a mission accomplished; the
long-awaited homecoming had arrived. Realizing that they no longer had a
purpose, I and L closed down. MM, Katolikus Szemle (Catholic Review) in
Rome, and Szivrvny (Rainbow) in Chicago, and other journals moved their
editorial offices to Hungary. Publishing houses like Arknum in Washington,
Aurora in Munich, Occidental Press in Washington closed down, Pski
moved from New York to Budapest and maintained its profile of publishing
populist writers. In the enthusiastic years after 1989 many held that the overcoming of separation restored the organic form of Hungarian culture, and
that censor-free exile publication could actually become a model at home (Pomogts, A nyugati magyar irodalom 42). Instead, the return of the exiles
sharpened the differences within Hungarian culture.
A major distinction soon became evident between those migrs who had
started their literary career at home, and those who entered it only in exile.
529
The former counted as household names and were more likely to be noted,
even if most of them, including Cs. Szab, Mrai, Zoltn Szab, or Nyro, did
not live to see the end of emigration. Their reception involved recalling their
works published at home. Old copies survived in family libraries and in the
special sections of public collections. New editions of their works were
started. Some received state decorations from the new governments as a compensation, and they regained their memberships in the Academy and in the
Writers Association, be it posthumously. The poet Gyrgy Faludy was one of
the few survivors who soon re-settled in Budapest. During the communist
era, handwritten copies of his poems had a limited illegal circulation, but his
autobiographical volume My Happy Days in Hell, first in samizdat (1987) then
legally (1989), instantaneously regained for him an immense popularity.
Gyozo Hatr, who left for the UK in 1956, did not give up his residence in
Wimbledon, but editions of his huge oeuvre, which ranges from fiction and
drama to philosophy, started to appear in Hungary after 1985. His eccentric
poetics, often likened to that of Joyce and Sterne, intrigued writers and evoked
a more professional interest than that of Faludy. Hatr started to publish
in the later 1940s, but he was silenced: the Stalinist critic Istvn Kirly called
him anti-humanist, and he was jailed between 1950 and 1952 for attempting
to cross the border illegally. The 1991 facsimile edition of his first novel Heline (1948) suggested a continuity with the short-lived democratic post-war
intermezzo.
Prose writers like Gyrgy Ferdinandy, Endre Kartson, Mtys Srkzi,
and poets like Jzsef Bakucz, Elemr Horvth, Lszl Kemenes Gfin, Gza
Thinsz, and Gyrgy Vitz, did not publish in Hungary before leaving and
could not reestablish continuity. Some domestic critical surveys introduced
them in the 1980s, but this could not compensate for their disadvantage, as
some of their works were not available, not even in the prohibited collections
of public libraries. These authors had to find an audience and interpreters not
only for what they had already written but for their forthcoming works as
well. They differed from earlier exiles in that most of them avoided the extremes of complete assimilation or nostalgically clinging to a domestic perspective. Mrai, who left already in 1948, thought that his European culture
was disappearing; going into exile seemed to him as losing the last possibility
of feeling at home anywhere. In contrast, those who left in 1956 led a double
life well after 1990. For some, a respectable academic career was still running
in their new home, which they would not give up merely for moving home;
only a few settled in Hungary even after their retirement. As Kibdi Varga set
forth in his aphoristic diary titled Amsterdam Chronicle (1999), and Kartson in
his two-volume autobiographical essay titled Otthonok (2007), they felt at
530
home at several places and in several cultures. For Mrai and his contemporaries, being at home meant an intimate, though problematically maintained,
relation with the Hungarian language; the young ones developed a multilingual identity, even if they often continued writing literature in their mother
tongue and publish only their scholarly works in their second or third language.
In search of historical precedents, one might refer to the return of the 1848
exiles after the 1867 Compromise with the Habsburgs, and the return of the
1919 exiles from Moscow in 1945. Both group gained key positions in the
new cultural and political establishment. Those returning after 1989 did not
even attempt to do this, although decades of absence and failed, or partially
successful, attempts to publish raised their expectations. The last issues of
L revealed that to gain impact at home, or even to get involved, would be
harder than expected. Contributors returning from their recent first visit to
Hungary noted that they and their works were little known at home (Sztray
153). Further complaints about domestic reception were voiced at a conference on exile held in Debrecen in 1989, which intended to pay tribute to the
home comers. Actually most migr authors frequently published in Hungary after 1989, although, as they rightly anticipated, their critical reception
remained low keyed.
A workshop in Hvz in 1994 titled Whos afraid of Hungarian literature
from the West? was symptomatic of the emerging mutual disappointments
and frustrations. The debate concerned the responsibility for the failure of
normal returns. While the chief organizer rather naively hoped for an era in
which natural reception would overcome ideological stances and exaggerated expectations (Pomogts, A befogads 100), the migrs insisted that
their exclusion continued and Hungarian literature remained domestic literature (Andrs 89). Accusing the writers at home that they fear competition, some revived the cold-war accusation that migrs were boycotted at
home (Kemenes Gfin 137). However, their expectations were sometimes
contradictory. On the one hand, they missed critics who would be devoted exclusively to their works to systematically locate the Western achievements
in the big picture. On the other, they disliked the notion of a Western Hungarian literature, for they quite rightly considered themselves simply Hungarian writers. Paradoxically, they longed for a special treatment while claiming to
be ordinary. Some had an impact with their scholarly work while their poetry
or fiction remained unacknowledged; some had not managed to find a modus
vivendi, others did. The poet and art historian Lszl Barnszky remarked
that when he started to frequent Budapest he could continue the conversations once suspended (107).
531
Those with an international academic career expected domestic intellectuals to turn to them for help and advice how to find cultural and scholarly
connections in the West. Their disappointment was deepened when they recognized that their competence was not needed or even questioned. Anticipating controversies on the question, who might be given authority to judge
Hungarian culture, Pter Balassa in Hungary responded to one of Hatrs essays with the remark that migr notions of literature and nation had become
awfully obsolete (440). Lszl Ksa pointed out in more general terms that
due to ageing and loss of an oppositional task the intellectual contribution of
migrs to domestic affairs regrettably proved less than impressive (71).
While admitting that distance also provides a unique perspective, Mihly Szegedy-Maszk suggested that sketchy knowledge of the domestic conditions
was a severe handicap (hontalansg 16567). Memoirs of political refugees
and migr historians writing on World War II, Hungarian Stalinism, or 1956
received wider attention than exilic poetry or fiction, though at times they also
had to face devastating domestic critiques. The Frankfurt Book Fair chose in
1999 Hungarian literature as its special concern, but this great opportunity for
self-representation aroused hot debates. Former migrs found it another occasion to complain that they were depreciated, that their works were underrepresented, and that the Hungarian organizers failed to contact them.
After 1990, exilic writers came to realize that the political piquancy attributed to them was quickly fading away. During the economic crisis after
1989 public interest in literature appeared to be vanishing, in part also because
it no longer functioned as a spearhead in the fight against censorship. The loss
of literatures social significance lead the Chicago linguist and poet dm
Makkai to diagnose a decline of literary culture in Hungary, and to suggest
that if he moved home he would paradoxically be even more homesick for
Hungarian literature. The reintegration of exilic literature proceeded parallel
with greater challenges to Hungarian society, namely a redefinition of
national culture and local integrity amidst globalization and Europeanization.
Former migrs had to find their space in a deeply divided society. Intense
political hostilities shortly followed the democratic transition, reviving the
controversies between the populists (npies) and the urbanists that prevailed
the 193040s. Domestic literati got deeply involved in what some have called
a new Kulturkampf. It roused some migrs to express their disapproval, although, ironically, that division also allowed others e.g. Borbndi on first
side and Fejto or Mray on the other to rejoin their former circles.
migr authors did not get integrated into the domestic scene, but this was
only partly due to the minor role delegated to migr critics after 1989. The
return of the migrs coincided with a change of guard in Hungarys intellec-
532
tual life, which deprived those abroad of some informal though supportive
personal connections. The younger domestic critics were keen to canonize in
the 1980s the postmodern turn of domestic authors like Pter Ndas and
Pter Esterhzy, thereby also establishing their own critical authority. Exilic
literature was not treated as entirely irrelevant. Still, when a potential place
in recent literary history was ascribed to Hungarian authors in the West, this
meant insertion into a framework that had been established without recognizing their works and achievements. Reintegration was carried out as necessary domestication. Some migr works obviously corresponded to newfound canonical values at home: those of Kartson to the poetics of metafiction and those of Ferdinandy to the avant-garde syntax in prose. Though
Hatrs novels could have made him a forerunner of postmodernism in Hungary, his late reception turned him into a latecomer of that movement.
Hungarian literary exile had no canon of its own. The connections between
the exile writers were too loose and remote to form an interpretive community. Moreover, the most qualified literary historians and theoreticians in exile
did not exclusively study Hungarian literature, or did not study it at all. Another source of misunderstanding was that some of the home-comers held
on to a canon of yesteryears with writers like Gyula Illys or Lszl Nmeth
who no longer, or no longer exclusively, prevailed in Hungary. That was why
Erno Kulcsr Szabs impressive study of Hungarian literature between 1947
and 1991 was rejected by George Gmri and some other migrs, though it
actually did attempt to integrate the exilic literature into the domestic one.
Kulcsr Szabs much debated concept of an interrupted continuity in the
Hungarian literature of the 195060s was loosely based on the migr notion
that a whole literature went into exile. Kulcsr Szab assigned significant
canonic positions to Domahidy, Ferdinandy, Hatr, Kemenes Gfin, Mrai,
Vitz, the MM-writers, and other migr authors, writers who could be considered excluded representatives of a fading modernism or as yet unregistered
forerunners of postmodernism.
Before 1989, migrs disagreed about the domestic literary canon mainly
on political grounds. However, as disagreements survived at the end of exile,
it became evident that the differences were mostly due to personal predilections. Kibdi Varga claimed that he could ascribe the worshipping of the poet
Imre Oravecz only to domestic misconceptions about poetry (Amszterdami
34). His exaggerated generalization ascribed a matter of personal taste to cultural differences. Nevertheless, in an interview he pointed out that it was illusory to believe that the collapse of communism would make the writing of a
true Hungarian literary history possible (Legyozhetetlen 62).
533
3. Redefining Exile, Redefining the Canon

Towards the millennium, the discussion on exile that started around 1989 exhausted itself and became repetitious. Exilic organizations still in Diaspora
came to realize that cooperation with the homeland would never reach the
level and form they desired, thus they ceased to attempt to interfere directly
with domestic affairs. The Svjci Magyar Irodalmi s Kpzomuvszeti Kr (SwissHungarian Society of Literature and Art) gave up, for instance, its Luganoconferences, due to lack of interest from home. As they bitterly commented
on their homepage, they turned back unto themselves: henceforth they
would maintain, register, and preserve in archives the cultural life of local
Hungarian communities, and support Hungarian minorities in their proceedings and programs. The Mikes Circle, however, goes on with its conferences,
dedicating its activities to a syncretic view of a global Hungarian culture.
Around the millennium, exile was redefined in the domestic critical scene.
Instead of the earlier, ethically or ideologically motivated welcoming gestures,
a more formalist approach came to prevail, as in Zsfia Szilgyis monograph
on Ferdinandy, which refused the melancholic myth of emigration and considered tracing the authors exilic experiences in literary texts as irrelevant.
Gbor Csords tried to universalize the notion of exile by asking whether it
was at all possible to feel at home. He vigorously claimed that Unheimlichkeit
was an insurmountable human condition, and the alienation of exilic writers
exemplified par excellence the general impossibility of being at home in Western culture. With the widening of focus, interest developed also for those previously disregarded authors who had appeared on the international scene in
another language, like Kriszta Arnthy, or writers that did not write in their
mother tongue, which they forgot having left the country as a child, like Tomaso Kemny. The periodical Hungaricum, launched in 2006, is entirely devoted to writers and artists with Hungarian background around the globe,
whatever their language. In addition, second generation authors of exilic
families start to get special attention. Books of Tibor Fischer, a noteworthy
British novelist and a descendant of 56 exiles, have been translated into Hungarian, for they have evident connections to Hungarian history and culture. A
chapter on to his novels in the latest Hungarian literary history suggests that
authors may appear in the future without a definite national identity (SzegedyMaszk, A magyarsg 837).
In the meantime, the cultural scene has reached a medialized phase, and
this transforms the way literature, even that of former exiles, is consumed. Faludys marriage over ninety and his declared bisexuality entered the tabloids
and TV-shows, making him something of a celebrity. Bestseller writers of the
534
interwar era who went into exile and became fairly unknown at home, started
to attain attention. The novelist Ferenc Krmendi, for instance, who had a
great international success in the 1930s, left for the US in 1939 and worked for
the Voice of America; Joln Fldes, who won first prize at an international
novel contest in 1936, sold millions of copies in a dozen languages, emigrated
to Britain in 1941, and switched to writing in English under the penname Yolanda Clarent. Both authors reappeared in the Hungarian series forgotten
classics in 2006. Their posthumous return was due to the current wave of
interwar nostalgia and the markets need for quality light reading. However,
they also moved some to urge that the ascension of popular genres should
redefine the canon and the process of canonizing. Fldess reappearance was
especially appreciated by the feminist.
The reception of two emblematic exile writers around the millennium
stirred up such interest that it all but transformed the whole Hungarian literary
scene: Sndor Mrai and Albert Wass have rather unexpectedly become the
most popular and best selling writers on the Hungarian literary market. Their
lives and novels were both put on the screen recently. During the Hungarian
Big Read campaign in 2005, which franchised the original British campaign,
three of Wasss titles made the Top 50 most popular Hungarian novels of all
time, one of them even getting into the final twelve. With Faludys My Happy
Days in Hell and Mrais Embers and Bekenntnisse eines Brgers in the Top 50, the
campaign revealed that these emblematic figures of exile reach a wide public.
Mrais works were republished in Hungary only after his death. As one
who committed suicide at the age of 89, and as an emblematic anti-communist, Mrai became a symbolic figure of exile. He represented the writers of
the bourgeoisie and the lost continuity with pre-communist Hungarian society. After the democratic transition he received a keen though ambivalent
scholarly attention as one who had been excluded from the literary traditions.
Kulcsr Szab has emphasized that his classical modernism revealed a broken
continuity with Europe but provided Hungarian postmodernism with a useful link to world-literature (2223). Szegedy-Maszks study aimed at getting
Mrai posthumous appreciation, but well in advance it warned against overestimating him or turning him into a cult figure. His popular reception was at
the outset not overwhelming. Many copies of a new complete edition of his
works, which counted on elderly readers still recalling his former success,
ended up in street-vendor sales. Thus the international fame that Mrai received around the millennium in Italy, Germany, the Netherlands and England, was quite a surprise to many, not only in Hungary but also among his fellow migrs, since he had already appeared on the European scene in
translations decades earlier without much notice. The Frankfurt Book Fair in
535
1999 was the breakthrough. His Glut (original title A gyertyk csonkig gnek),
considered by Hungarian critics as one of his weakest works, sold hundredthousands of copies in Germany. Recognizing that his works of lesser importance achieved international success, even Istvn Fried, an admirer of Mrai,
labeled his success a possible misunderstanding, finding it an enigma that
still needs to be puzzled out (18598).
Wass, a Transylvanian novelist who wrote parables of the Trianon trauma
that were repressed during the communist era, had not attracted much attention until his suicide in 1998, certainly not one that could be compared to his
recent inexplicably vast popularity (see John Neubauers essay in this volume).
He became a right-wing cult figure, a code for ideological identification: admiring him or being indignant about him reveals political predilections. The
leftist philosopher Gspr Mikls Tams labeled him our only entertaining
fascist, others find his new-fangled cult of myths and counter-myths rather
psychotic. From the extreme right some label him the last Hungarian writer
with a true national sentiment. Wass enormous success is not the product of
new critical currents, but ideology and interest in minority issues do not explain it fully either. Being a right-wing Transylvanian author did not bring him
much popularity in the early 1990s; he became an object of worship only
when a younger right-wing generation appeared on the scene. Some of his less
politicized fans probably enjoy just his old fashioned storytelling, a counterpart to postmodern decadence. According to the latest news he dominates
the prison libraries.
Works Cited
Andrs, Sndor. Befogads vagy egyttlt? (Reception or Co-existence?). Kortrs 39.2
(1995): 8991.
Balassa, Pter. sszehasonlt srelemtudomny (Comparative Grievance Studies).
jhold-vknyv (New-Moon Yearbook). Vol. 2.2. Ed. Balzs Lengyel. Budapest: Magveto, 1988. 44050.
Barnszky, Lszl. n mg egy tredkkel is berem, ha az igazi tredk (It Takes a Fragment to Satisfy Me, If It Is a Real One). Hazajttnk ht hazajttnk? 12 beszlgets hatron tli alkotkkal (We Have Come Home Have We? Twelve Conversations with
Authors from Abroad). Ed. Erzsbet Erdlyi and Ivn Nobel. Budapest: Trogat,
1998. 97107.
Bldi, Mikls, et al. A magyar irodalom trtnete 19451975 IV. A hatron tli magyar irodalom
(History of Hungarian Literature 19451975. Vol. IV: Hungarian Literature Abroad).
Budapest: Akadmiai, 1982.
Bldi, Mikls, Bla Pomogts, and Lszl Rnay. A nyugati magyar irodalom 1945 utn (Hungarian Literature in the West after 1945). Budapest: Gondolat, 1986.
Borbndi, Gyula. Nvazonossgok (Homonyms). let s irodalom 36 ( July 3, 1992): 2.
536
Borbndi, Gyula, Kldetsem nem volt, szolglatra sem krt fl senki (I Had No
Mission, nor did Anybody Asked Me to Serve). Erdlyi and Nobel. 9298.
Csords, Gbor. Odsszeuszok s tkozl fik (Ulysseses and Prodigal Sons). let s irodalom 41
(December 17, 1997): 20.
Domahidy, Andrs. Vnasszonyok nyara (Indian Summer). Rome: Lehel-plyzat, 1969. Budapest: Magveto, 1986.
Domahidy, Andrs. rnyak s asszonyok (Shades and Women). Bern: Eurpai Protestns
Magyar Szabadegyetem, 1979. 2nd ed. Budapest: Magveto, 1985. Shades and Women. Trans.
Elizabeth Windsor. Perth: Aeolian, 1989.
Erdlyi, Erzsbet and Ivn Nobel, ed. Induljunk teht: otthonrl haza. 12 beszlgets hatron tli
esszrkkal (Let Us Go then: from Home to Fatherland. Twelve Conversations with Essayists from Abroad). Budapest: Trogat, 1996.
Faludy, Gyrgy. Pokolbli vg napjaim (My Happy Days in Hell). Budapest: AB Fggetlen,
1987. 2nd ed. Budapest: Magyar Vilg, 1989. My Happy Days in Hell. Trans. Kathleen
Szsz. London: Deutsch, 1962.
Fried, Istvn. A siker valban flrerts? Szempontok Mrai Sndor nmet utletnek rtelmezshez (Is Success really a Misunderstanding? Perspectives on Interpreting
Mrais German Afterlife). Siker s flrerts kztt. Mrai Sndor korszakok hatrn (Between Success and Misunderstanding. Mrai on the Divide between Epochs). Szeged:
Tiszatj Knyvek, 2007. 185198.
Gmri, George. Erno Kulcsr Szab: A magyar irodalom trtnete 19451991. World
Literature Today 68 (1994): 401.
Hatr, Gyozo. Heline. Budapest: Magyar Tka, 1948. Facs. rpt. Budapest: Magveto. 1991.
Kartson, Endre [alias Boldizsr Szkely]. Az oszthatatlan magyar irodalom (Undividable
Hungarian Literature). Irodalmi jsg 5 (August 1, 1962): 7.
Kartson, Endre. Milyen magyar r lettem a Mikesen (What Sort of a Writer I Have Become at
the Mikes Conferences). Szmads. Hollandiai Mikes Kelemen Kr (19512001) (An Account. The Kelemen Mikes Society of Holland, 19512001). Ed. Melinda Knya, ron
Kibdi Varga, and Zoltn Piri. Bratislava: Kalligram, 2001. 12739.
Kemenes Gfin, Lszl. Maradok tovbbra is kvlll (I remain an Outsider). Erdlyi
and Nobel. 13239.
Kibdi Varga, ron. Nyugati magyar irodalom (Hungarian Literature in the West). 1976.
Prbeszd Magyarorszggal (A Dialogue With Hungary). Ed. Bla Pomogts. Budapest:
Szpirodalmi, 1991. 34751.
Kibdi Varga, ron. Legyozhetetlen tvolsg van let s irodalom kztt (An Unbridgeable Distance Exists between Life and Literature). Vrnak a kapuk (The Gates Are Waiting). Ed. Erzsbet Erdlyi and Ivn Noble. Budapest: Trogat, 1997. 5963.
Kibdi Varga, ron. Amszterdami krnika 1999 (Amsterdam Chronicle 1999). Bratislava:
Kalligram, 2000.
Kovcs, Imre, Kijzanult emigrci (Emigration Sobered up). Lthatr 6 (1956): 411.
Ksa, Lszl. Minosg elit kisebbsg (Quality, Elite, Minority). Kisebbsgben lenni nem
sors, hanem feladat (Being in Minority is not Fate but a Task). Pozsony/Bratislava: Ausztriai Magyar Egyesletek s Szervezetek Kzponti Szvetsge, 1992. 6472.
Kulcsr Szab, Erno. A magyar irodalom trtnete 19451991 (A History of Hungarian Literature, 19451991). Budapest: Argumentum, 1993.
Makkai, dm. Minden egyes nyelv ms-ms ablak a vilgra (Every Language Is a different Window onto the World). Erdlyi and Nobel 4852.
537
Mrai, Sndor. Embers. Trans. C. B. Janeway from the Hungarian A gyertyk csonkig gnek
(The Candles Burn to their Stub). London: Penguin, 2003.
Mrai, Sndor. Bekennentnisse eines Brgers. Trans. Hans Skirecki from the Hungarian Egy polgr vallomsai. Berlin: Oberbaum, 2000.
Mrton, Lszl. Lgiposta (Airmail/Mail from Heaven). Paris: Magyar Muhely, 1989.
Mrton, Lszl. Trvnyen kvl (Outlawed). let s irodalom 36 ( July 24, 1992): 2.
Mrton, Lszl. Ki az igazi Mrton Lszl? (Who is the genuine Lszl Mrton?), Npszabadsg 37 (November 4, 1993): 17.
Pomogts, Bla, ed. Prbeszd Magyarorszggal. Nyugati-Eurpai s tengerentli magyar tanulmnyrk (A Dialogue with Hungary. Hungarian Essayists in Western Europe and Overseas).
Budapest: Szpirodalmi, 1991.
Pomogts, Bla. A nyugati magyar irodalom a kirekesztstol a befogadsig (Hungarian Literature in
the West from Exclusion to Admission). Alfld 41.2 (1990): 4153.
Pomogts, Bla. A befogads konfliktusai. A nyugati magyar irodalom Magyarorszgon (Conflicts
of Admission. Western Hungarian Literature in Hungary). Kortrs 48.10 (1994): 94100.
Szab, Lszl Cs. Mg vagyunk (We Still Exist). Nyugati magyar irodalom (Western Hungarian Literature). Amsterdam: Hollandiai Mikes Kelemen Kr, 1976. 1136.
Szab, Lszl Cs. Grgkrol (On the Greeks). Budapest: Eurpa, 1986.
Szegedy-Maszk, Mihly. Mrai Sndor. Budapest: Akadmiai, 1991.
Szegedy-Maszk, Mihly. A hontalansg irodalma (Literature of Homelessness). jrartelmezsek (Reinterpretations). Budapest: Krnika Nova, 2000. 15174.
Szegedy-Maszk, Mihly. A magyarsg (nyelven tli) emlke (Memory of the Hungarians beyond Language). A magyar irodalom trtnetei III. 1920-tl napjainkig (Histories of
Hungarian Literature). Vol. 3 (From 1920 until today). Ed. Mihly Szegedy-Maszk and
Andrs Veres. Budapest: Gondolat, 2007. 83137.
Szilgyi, Zsfia. Ferdinandy Gyrgy. Bratislava: Kalligram, 2002.
Sztray, Zoltn. Gondolatok a nyugati magyar irodalomrl (Reflections On the Western Hungarian Literature). j Lthatr 31 (1989): 14557.
Tth, Gyrgy and Andrs Veres, ed. rk przon. A Kiadi Foigazgatsg irataibl, 19611970
(Writers on a Leash. From the Documents of the Publishing Office, 19611970). Budapest: MTA Irodalomtudomnyi Intzete, 1992.
Varga, Lajos Mrton. Ki az igazi Mrton Lszl? (Who is the Genuine Lszl Mrton?).
Npszabadsg 37 (October 29, 1993): 17.
538
Albert Wass: Rebirth and Apotheosis of a

Transylvanian-Hungarian Writer
John Neubauer
1. Immigration, and Literary Debut in the US: 195152

After two years in a DP camp near Regensburg (194547), two years in the
Bavarian village of Bleibach (1947-May 1949), and two years (194951) of
working in Hamburg for his wifes family as a night-watchman, the Transylvanian-Hungarian writer Albert Wass disembarked in New York on September 21, 1951. He went on to work on the Ohio farm of William G. McClain in
Bellair (on the Ohio river, southwest of Pittsburgh), probably with the help of
Robert A. Taft, the anti-communist and anti-New Deal Senator of the state,
who was a distant relative of McClain. Within a year, Wass divorced his wife
and married McClains daughter.
Radio Free Europe offered, and Wass gladly accepted, the opportunity to
write at $ 200/month a weekly column for the radio titled Letter from the
West (Nyugati levl), in which Wass reported on American agriculture and
the American way of life (Turcsny, lete 1920). Eager to introduce himself to
the Hungarian-American reading public, he arranged for the republication of
two works that he wrote and published already in Europe: Elvsz a nyom (The
Trace Disappears) and Ember az orszgt szln (Man at the Roadside), which
turned out to be questionable visiting cards for the New World. Nobody
could imagine, however, that these American failures would become key
works in making Wass one of the most popular author in early-twenty-firstcentury Hungary. The story of failure and resurrection deserves a closer look.
Kicsi Anna srkeresztje (The Cross on Little Annas Grave)
The story claims to be based on historical events, but Mezoblkny, the name
of the setting, is not on the map (though there are various villages with -blkny). The villagers of Mezoblkny are, according to the narrator, neither
communists nor particularly fond of Jews, but they decide to hide Bihora,
Albert Wass (John Neubauer)
539
the communist smith, and the Jewish Mr. Weis, for the Germans and people
who were similarly quarrelsome are intensely hunting for their kind (18).
They hide them in an abandoned grain cellar, and tell orphan Little Anna,
who watches the village sheep, to provide them daily with food and other
necessities. When the Russian arrive, the two come out, and now the villagers
turn to them for help, for the liberators rape women, rob, destroy the church,
and kill the household animals. Bihora tries to intervene but cannot communicate with the Russians; Weiss, who seems to know Russian (presumably
he came from the Pale), sits already in a departing car and shouts back, I am
needed in the city! If you need anything, turn with confidence to the commanding comrade! He has a translator at his side! (21) However, the commander mistrusts Bihoras communist conviction and chases him away with a
whip. Little Anna is raped by eight soldiers, and Bihora, who tries to intervene, is severely beaten. Several weeks later, he drags himself to her grave and
plants on it a cross with the inscription Here lies Little Anna and Liberty
(22) for which he is once more beaten up and jailed. In sum, Wass allows his
communist Bihora to convert to a liberal Christian humanism, while his Jewish Mr. Weis shows ingratitude, betrayal, and collusion with the beastly violent
Soviet soldiers. The violence of the German and Hungarian Nazis remains
here (and elsewhere) beyond the horizon of Wasss fiction. We may add in anticipation that Jewish ingratitude will be a recurrent theme of his.
Kicsi Anna srkeresztje, Wasss first US publication, appeared in the
Amerikai Magyar Npszava in May 1952. The same month already, Jnos Kereszthegyi accused Wass of anti-Semitic agitation in a highly critical review of
the story in Ferenc Gndrs New York weekly Az Ember: The novella is a
cleverly and, for the time being, cautiously formulated anti-Semitic propaganda indictment of Mr. Weiss, and, through him, of all Jews: they are responsible for the terrible situation in communist Hungary. Kereszthegyi saw
in the publication of the novella and Wasss engagement as a contributor, a
sign that the new editors of the Amerikai Magyar Npszava were giving the
paper a neo-Nazi turn, but he also knew about Wasss Transylvanian past, and,
especially, about his novel Adjtok vissza a hegyeimet! (see below), which he regarded as a serious distortion of the historical events. Kereszthegyi felt compelled to speak up against Wasss masked anti-Semitism because he did not
want to fight Bolshevism at the cost of reviving Nazism, fascism, and antiSemitism.
Wass responded angrily with the article larcos bohzat kicsi Anna srkeresztje krl (Masked Farce around the Cross on Little Annas Grave; Turcsny, lete 8285), claiming that nobody objected when he had published the
story in 1949 in Hungarian, German, and French papers. Why the fuss now?
540
After all, he claimed, Weis was merely a minor character in the story and his
real target was communism. In support, he cited a Rabbi whom he met at
Senator Tafts campaign tour to win the Republican presidential nomination.
The Rabbi volunteered to read the story and exonerated him of the charges
(8384). Encouraged by the Rabbis testimony, Wass went into a counterattack, and accused Gndr and Kereszthegyi: This group had escaped after
the collapse of the 1919 Hungarian communist reign of terror, and slipped
into the US (82). Under the banner of democracy and freedom, it now agitated for a repetition of what happened in 1945: Then, it celebrated with
drunken ecstasy the Bolshevik terror and the bloody massacres that hit the
Hungarian people. It applauded when Cardinal Mindszenty was put in jail and
tortured, applauded when thousands of Hungarian peasants were carried off
into captivity (82). The writers around Ember did not return home, because
their main goal was to prepare American Bolshevism. Hence Wasss conclusion: Poor, poor little scared rats there, in the cavities of New York. See,
they lost their head in panic (84). Anticipating Tafts election and McCarthys
rise to higher power, Wass foresaw the end of Communism and the dawn of a
new world. A few months later, the Republicans nominated Eisenhower, who
won the elections afterwards.
We ought to add that Wasss attack missed its target. Gndr briefly served
as President of the Press Directorate during the Hungarian Soviet Republic in
1919, but Az Ember, which he had started on October 1, 1918, was soon forbidden during the Commune, and Gndr became for the rest of his life an
anti-Bolshevik left-wing social-democrat. He restarted Az Ember in Vienna in
1926, and took it with him to New York. The paper advocated cooperation
with the post-1945 coalition government in Hungary, but turned against the
communist regime in 1948, when the Communist Party swallowed up and
liquidated the Social Democratic Party. The Rkosi regime put the paper on
its black list. By 1952, Az Ember was as violently anti-communist as Wass himself (see Borbndi letrajz 1: 211, 23235, esp. 234), save that it attacked the old
and new Nazis with equal passion. Gndrs aggressive fight against Communism, as well as the neo-Nazis, explains why he is attacked even today from
both sides: while the neo-Nazis abuse him as a communist Jew (see the top internet item on him titled Eltiltott kderlapok [last checked on November 22, 2008]). In the internet version of the Magyar letrajzi Lexikon (Hungarian Biographical Lexicon), which has obviously not been revised since
1989, Az Ember is called a yellow paper that reviles the communists. The
contributors of the paper included such highly respected Hungarian exiles
and migrs as Pl Tbori, Pl Kri, Menyhrt Lengyel, Istvn Borsody, Mikes
Gyrgy, and Sri Megyeri.
541
Elvsz a nyom (The Trace Disappears)

Curiously, all these violent controversies neglected Elvsz a nyom (1952),
Wasss first US book publication that was much more explicitly anti-Semitic
than Kicsi Anna srkeresztje. Only Andor Jnos, a frequent contributor of
Az Ember, published in Buenos Aires a devastating review of the novel (Wass,
lete 8891; no source indicated; very likely it was the Jewish Buenos-Aires
weekly Hatikva [Hope], to which Jnos was a contributor).
Elvsz a nyom appeared with Kossuth, a Hungarian publisher in Cleveland, whose directorship Wass was to assume a year later. This variation on
Thornton Wilders The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1928) traces the lives of six Boy
Scouts who miraculously escape from drowning in their boat under a waterfall. Baradlay, the local protestant minister, immigrates later to America, but
seeking to resolve the miracle he looks up the boys one by one towards the
end of his life, in 1949, and urges them to immigrate to America. Their lives
are told by a conventional external narrator.
Each of the men represents an ethnic group, a profession, and a nationality:
the Hungarian Prince Gergely Drgffy is a landowner; the Czech Basil Vranin
a petit-bourgeois blue-collar worker; the Pole Kazimir Lubovszki a bohemian
artist; the Romanian Jon ( Jonel) Bursanu a nationalist politician; the German
Herbert Habicht a natural scientist; and the Jewish Gottfried Pohrisch a
banker (how could it be otherwise!).
The heart of the novel is the double story of Lubovszki and Pohrisch. Kazimir is poor, reckless, and irresistibly attractive to women. In dire need, he remembers Pohrisch, the fat Jewish boy who became his servile follower in
school because Kazimir once defended him against bullying (105). The adult
banker greets him with a sickeningly sweet voice (106), but his thick lower
lip protrudes and a satanic triumphant smirk spreads over his swollen
face when Kazimir pumps him for money: no money, only work (107).
Kazimir becomes engaged to va, a seemingly rich girl, but she breaks the engagement after visiting his desolate quarters. va then marries Pohrisch to
save her fathers faltering department store, mostly owned by Pohrischs bank.
Kazimir finds out at a dinner that this fat toad (122) married her, and convinces va to run away with him. When Pohrisch tracks them down and
threatens her to ruin her father (126), Kazimir knocks down this disgusting,
slimy oyster with a full hit into the fatty, swollen face (127). va stays with
the miserable vile rat who bought her body for money like the butcher buys
cattle on the market (128) but she is finally driven to suicide.
A complementary story focuses on Pohrischs relation to the lurid Jewish
community. His fathers visitors carried big bags, and smelled of sweat; they
542
whispered self-importantly with his father, always about business and money;
sometimes they were very old, must colored, and in rags, with black fur hats,
red beards, and hanging corkscrew curls (152). Jassa Mendelovits, agent of a
mysterious worldwide Jewish organization, tells Pohrisch that the Jews of the
world will support all his business ventures but will curse him, despoil him,
and expel him if he breaks Jehovas Law (164). Although Gottfried marries the
gentile va, Mendelovitss organization rescues his wealth from the Nazis, for
it belongs to all Jews, not him alone (162). Instead of using the American visa
that Mendelovits provided for him, Gottfried stays behind and witnesses how
enthusiastically the Austrians greet the Nazi troops. For the first time he becomes aware of the unbridgeable gulf that separates him from the Viennese,
and he remembers Mendelovitss words that the home of the Jews is an idea:
they are not Austrian, Polish, or English but everywhere only Jewish (199).
Gottfried survives the Holocaust and becomes the administrator of a
former concentration camp. Trafficking with gold, diamonds, dollars, and
American smuggled goods, he does, like all other Jews, excellent business:
People who lost everything, Jews who survived the claws of death, became millionaires
within weeks on the German black market. The invisible net that served so well for centuries worked splendidly once more: the threads reached over oceans and continents,
and the goods streamed over water, land, and air, via forbidden and permitted routes.
And it was good so: I entrust all the people to you said Jehova. (205)
However, Kazimir ruins Gottfried glorious new ventures when the two
meet again in a DP camp, where Pohrisch once more characterized as
puffed up, short, and fat is a Screening Officer for a UN organization.
Gottfried gives all the money, the goods, and the immigration slots to the
Jews (206), and he falsifies Kazimirs record by labeling him a collaborator.
Kazimir, unaware of this, hates this Shylock for having taken va from
him (147): hissing her name into his disgusting, swollen face, he knocks
him down again. Facing the military court, he declares his only regret: not
having killed Pohrisch (149).
Of the remaining boys, the honest and courageous Drgffy builds a model
farm in Czechoslovakia but loses everything under the communist regime.
Still, he tells Baradlay that morality, not wealth, makes a gentleman, and that
loyalty, decency, and goodwill matter, not the political regimes (57). The Romanian Jon ( Jonel) Bursanu becomes a politician and demands in his parliamentary maiden speech that the permit of the Pohrisch Bank to exploit the
upper-Moldavian forests be rescinded (213). He sympathizes with the Nazis,
holds anti-Semitic speeches, and vainly tries to prevent the return of Northern-Transylvania to Hungary (216). Baradlay tells him that the US seeks a
decisive victory over the Soviet dictatorship and it would help the small
543
nations of the region if they overcame their nationalism (232). Herbert Habicht becomes a professor of science at Knigsberg University and makes a
major discovery; but when the Nazis pressure him to exploit the invention for
building weapons of mass destruction, he denies his success. After the war, he
feels guilty for having placed humanity above patriotism, especially since
other nations successfully used the invention to defeat Germany. Baradlay
convinces him to go to the US. Six of the seven men gather in a compartment
of the train that takes them to the port of Bremen. The seventh, Pohrisch,
is also on the train but he is reluctant to join them. When he finally appears
with Baradlay in the door, the train derails and the accident kills Baradlay. The
seven ex-boys stay alive, but whether they will proceed to the US remains
open. Wass himself did, and Elvsz a nyom shows that the baggage he brought
along contained a heavy dose of anti-Semitism.
Meeting Emil Havas

Towards the end of his life, in December 1992, Wass published in the Katolikus Magyarok Vasrnapja a much-quoted account of a meeting with a certain
Emil Havas:
I had hardly arrived in America, a good forty years ago, when a gentleman knocked at the
door of my hotel room in New York, who was once, a long time ago, a scribbler at a Kolozsvr daily called Ellenzk. Emil Havas, as he was called, became meanwhile an American journalist, contributor to the New York Times and co-editor of the Readers Digest; entering my tight room he first sized me up with eyes screwed up and shook his head. I
thought you were older, he confessed, it would be a great pity if you wasted your talent
on things you write in these days. I come with a proposition, my visitor came to the
point. Write a book as we plan it for you, and I guarantee that well make a bestseller out
of it. The Readers Digest would also bring it, we make a film of it, and in less than a year
you will earn with it a million dollars! I asked what the topic would be. My life, for instance, came the reply. A Jewish boy is beaten up by fascist students; after many adventures he arrives in America and his talent unfolds, he becomes a famous man.
We must have spent about ten minutes this way. Listen, he said finally, if you accept our
offer and write the way we want it, we make a successful writer out of you. But if not and
Mr. Havas raised his voice here not a single book of yours will appear in this country ever.
Do you understand? We control the American press, the book publishing, and the film industry. In this country, people read only what we put in their hands; they see and hear what
we want. If you want to live here, you will write as we want it or you will not write at all.
It took less than two years for me to realize that Emil Havas was right. I sent in vain
the English translations of my manuscripts to the publishers and journals; most of the
time they did not even return them. Finally a man at a reputable agency gave the secret
away: Your name is blacklisted. No publisher would dare to accept them. (Turcsny,
lete 12021)
544
Anyone wondering what we can mean here should read a 1993 variant of
the anecdote at http://www.halas.net/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=4341. The second article, titled How I became an anti-Semite,
spells it out: Havas meant the (American) Jews. His threat revives the anti-Semitic allegation that the American press, publishers, and film studios are all in
the hands of an all-powerful Jewish network. And the coda of the anecdote
proves that the network was not simply invented by a sick mind: Wass claims
that he became truly boycotted. He conveniently ignores the blacklists that
did indeed exist in the US around 195152, which were set up by Senator
McCarthy and his ill-famed House Committee on Un-American Activities.
They listed leftist writers and people in the film industry, who were more
often than not Jews. Wass was not shy to resort to an even more radical version of such stunning conspiracies in 1966: Today, it is clear to everybody
that both world wars served only the aims of a very cunningly organized conspiracy, and that the invention of Marxism as well as the creation of the United
Nations was meant to place at the head of the world this small conspiratorial
group (Jzan 1: 163 nota bene in a volume titled With a Sober Hungarian Eye!).
Did Havas really exist? Did the meeting really take place? With such questions in mind, I did a little research and found, to my own surprise, positive
answers to both of them in the New York Times Index and an article that the
real Havas published in the November 1952 issue (p. 5) of his Antibolseviki
Frum, a reporter paper edited and published by him in New York (a copy
of it is preserved in the Vasvry Collection of the Somogyi Public Library in
Szeged, Hungary).
Let us rewind then our reel and look at the meeting through the eyes of
Havas. Both his account and that of Wass leave no doubt that they describe
the first (and probably only) meeting of the two men. It took place in October or November 1952 (not 1951), for Wass appeared with his new wife,
Elisabeth McClain, whom Havas describes as a very pretty and clever distant relative of Senator Taft. Wass was apparently on a visit in New York,
tried to reach an official of a Hungarian association, found accidentally
Havas on the line, and the two agreed to meet next day. Hence the subtitle of
the Havas article, An Accidental Conversation with Count Albert Wass, the
Writer, which contradicts Wasss claim that Havas had sought him out.
Havas writes:
I was very curious about this writer, who started as a great talent and has apparently
come in recent years under bad political influence, because two of his writings an undoubtedly anti-Semitic novella, and his latest book, Thirteen Apple Trees, which has a
political background reveal strong anti-Semitic tendencies.
545
Addressing Wass in the interview, Havas added that in the criticized texts (the
first of which was, of course Kicsi Anna) the writer had portrayed the Jew
as a thankless, wicked, and ill-willed person, and did not say a single good
word about the people that suffered most in the war, and undoubtedly innocently. Wass defended himself by claiming that he had no ulterior political
motives when writing and nothing was further from him than to offend the
Jews that suffered so much. However, he reserved himself the right to portray bad as well as good Jews. Havas was fair enough to use as title of his article
Wasss self-defense, I Protest being Called an anti-Semite.
The interview part of Havass article concludes with an agreement that
Wass would develop his response in an article that Havas would publish. The
second part of the article concerns the controversy that Wass unleashed after
the interview with a speech commemorating the 1849 Hungarian martyrs of
Arad. Drawing a parallel with the post-1945 execution of Nazis and their collaborators, he labeled as henchmen (pribk) Mrton Himmler and his Hungarian unit of the US Army that received orders to round up and hand over to
the Hungarian government former Nazi and Arrow-cross leaders many of
whom were then tried and executed. For Wass, most of these were good Hungarian patriots who fought against Hungarys bolshevik occupation. Andor
Fisher-Fy, editor of the Detroit paper A Magyarok Bnyszlapja (Mining Paper
of the Hungarians), found this outrageous, and criticized Wass so bitterly that
the writer denounced the paper as communist in a letter to President-elect Eisenhower (Ember December 6, 1952: 5). Havas asked Wass to restate his position against the accusations, and he did, indeed, print Wasss response of November 11, 1952, together with Havass own final comments, which were
critical, but highly polite to the very end. The tone of the article simply excludes the alleged threats and boycotts..
I shall not deal here with Wasss highly questionable self-defense and his
defense of Nazi criminals. Instead, I want to ask why Wass invented his version of the meeting with Havas at the end of his life, when Havas was no
longer around to contradict it. (The obituary of Havas appeared in the NY
Times on January 4, 1957. He was born in Ungvr/Uzhgorod, where he also
worked for a while. Later he did work for the Times, though in a minor position.) Wass must have received a copy of Havass article, but he probably forgot or suppressed it. At the end of his life he needed, I suggest, a self-defense
that would put the blame for his American failures on somebody else, and the
Jews, via Havas, were convenient and familiar means to do this. I shall trace
the literary and political career of Wass from its Hungarian beginnings to its
American decades to substantiate my suggestion.
546
2. Transylvanian Decline and Resistance: 193440

The decisive event in Wasss life was the annexation of Transylvania to Romania in 1919. Wasss family of nobility stayed on its estate in Romanian
Transylvania, most of which fell on the Hungarian side of the border when
Northern Transylvania was re-annexed by Hungary in 1940. He fled with his
family in 1944, when the Soviet troops conquered Transylvania and returned
it to Romania.
From a political perspective, 1945 was a watershed in Wasss writing, but
the periods before and after it divide once more in two. For the pre-1945
period, the 1940 re-annexation of Northern Transylvania was crucial,
whereas the dividing point of the second period was Wasss immigration to
the US in 1951. The present and the following section are devoted to the main
works of the two pre-1945 phases. Section III will deal with the works that
Wass wrote during his European exile but did not republish in the US,
whereas Section IV gives an account of his activities in Florida.
Farkasverem (Wolf Pit)

Wasss first novel, published in 1935, established him as a promising young
writer. In the following years he became an important figure in Transylvanian
Hungarian literature, which flourished during the interwar period.
Farkasverem portrays three Hungarian/Transylvanian landowner families that
lead, in the 1920s, a depressed existence in the Mezosg, now annexed by Romania. The older generation, represented by bris Bedo, Ferenc Zenthay, and
the half-demented widow Baroness Rpolthy, has no grip on the world. Towards the end of the novel she is torn to pieces by her beloved wolfs. Until then,
however, she has absolute power over her son, Baron Jeno Rpolthy, once a
promising writer in Budapest who now lives at home in Csudkfalva (village of
marvels), drinking heavily, and falling apart. A ray of hope appears when he
falls in love with his neighbor Klra Zenthay, and even tries to write again. However, Klra, who just returned from the world, is so shocked by his dissolute
room and surroundings that she terminates the budding love-affair. In the end,
Jeno marries a sober widow who assumes his mothers former power over him.
Tibor Zenthay, Klras brother, works hard to develop his fathers estate at
Halasd, but he does not understand people and is so un-romantic that gnes,
the teen-age daughter of bris Bedo, turns him down. She grows up and acquires self-assurance in Budapest. rpd Halsz lives with his three spinster
aunts, and manages his estate with difficulty. He is also attracted to Klra, but
547
she does not care for his manners, not even when he returns after a few weeks in
Budapest. rpd and Tibor dislike Cluj/Kolozsvr, and Budapest even more.
In short, Jeno and the young women are attracted to a glittering mundane
world, but cannot afford joining in, whereas Tibor and rpd are stuck with the
managing of poor estates. They are all lonely, unhappy, and dissatisfied with
their lives.
Of the rest of the world we see little, except for some servants and the keeper
of the village pub, who is one of Wasss more attractive Jewish characters. The
novel concludes on a rainy, grey, and muddy day, in a barren landscape. A student-like poor young Romanian walks with his little belongings towards an
uncertain future. Between potholes in the fog he wanders from Ciudac towards Campina, not from Csudkfalva to Halasd: the future belongs to the Romanian youth in a Romanian setting. Hungarian culture is on the decline.
Farkasverem generally blames the Hungarians rather than the Romanians
for their plight. Only one episode shows Romanian corruption: a Romanian
peasant cuts down and steals an apple tree from a Hungarian, who smacks
him so that it breaks his jaw; false Romanian testimonies enable the Romanian
to win his lawsuit against the Hungarian. As Aladr Schpflin, a leading critic
in the leading journal Nyugat wrote, the work shows how a social class dies off,
not under the pressure of external circumstances, but from inside, due to the
desiccation of internal energy. This class [] goes into its final ruin voluntarily, by its own initiative, almost consciously (1). Schpflin had not read
anything as depressing and disturbing for a long time, but he found the novel
honest, and the characters genuine. The portrayal was consistent and without
tendentiousness.
Csaba
Five years later, Wass published his second novel, Csaba. The exact dating of
the writing is of considerable importance. The Hungarians reoccupied
Northern Transylvania in September 1940, and since the first reviews of the
book appeared already in November, Vilmos goston cannot be right in
claiming that Csaba was the first product of the post-re-annexation period
(223). Indeed, it is much more likely that Erzsbet Kdrs November review
reflected the new, more aggressive Hungarian disposition: she found the heroes of the novel too meek (Csaba).
The novel starts with little Ferk Filekis experience of the changeover in
1919, and becomes a portrayal of how, as an adult, he manages to shake up the
Hungarian community of the little mixed village Mruc. He comes from an
548
urban middle-class family that his doomed under the Romanian regime. However, Ferk turns into a successful farmer in Mruc, and he repeatedly overcomes confrontations with the Romanian peasants, who cut down a beloved
forest, and the officials, who unsuccessfully try to exclude the Hungarians
from voting. His most important achievement is to replace an aged and lethargic Hungarian Calvinist minister with an enthusiastic young one who helps
him activate the Hungarians. Together, they are able to save the Hungarian
elementary school by building a new home for it with their own hands and
with other Hungarians who thought that this was impossible. Ferk is friends
with the older Hungarian Bandi bcsi, but he knows how to restrain him
when he gets temperamental and dictatorial in confrontations, mostly with
the Romanian peasants and local bureaucrats, but also with the Hungarian
peasants, whom he does not trust. The Romanians are seldom vicious; they
may attempt to misuse their power, but they are ready to follow the law,
though only when they are reminded of it.
In contrast to most of Wasss later novels, the Jews here are not powerful,
but only few of them are attractive. Reich bcsi, a pub owner, is a harmless and
rather attractive old man, but his son aspires to play a role in the glittering
mundane world, steals money from his father, and seduces and abandons
Bandi bcsis gullible daughter. Ferk, who always found him disgusting, gently returns her into her fathers arms. A second Jew, Ferks socialist student
friend, becomes a bourgeois storekeeper who refuses to help Ferks school
project. In one of Wasss typical railroad encounters, Ferk sits in a compartment with two Romanians and a scared old Jewish man. Ferk listens silently
to the Romanian abuses of Jews; but silences them when they start to agitate
against the Hungarians (17879).
Ferks intellectual friends in the village are Bern and Anuca, the Romanian teachers, who are more literate than Ferk. Anuca knows that the ethnic
groups of Transylvanias multi-cultural society are often closed, and speak only
their own language. In general, she thinks, they are all good people who will,
in a few years, integrate into a unified Romanian society (82). Anuca falls in
love with Ferk, and he is touched by her beauty, but his leadership in rebuilding the Hungarian school fortifies his Hungarian identity and gradually
widens the gap between them. In the end, Ferks attention turns to the Hungarian teacher, Annuska, though not because ultra-nationalism. In one of the
novels final scenes he tells his vision to the Romanian Tdor Jepuruc:
Every nation will direct its own destiny, for this is the truth, and they will all be in a grand
federation. Of course, this cannot be done overnight. The nations will first be reconciled
with each other here in Transylvania, then the small nations of the Danube will join.
There will be a big common country. Borders and duties will disappear. (184)
549
This is not the rhetoric that accompanied the annexation of Northern

Transylvania. The picture of the Hungarian and Romanian communities of
Transylvania is not only broader here than it was in Farkasverem, but also more
hopeful. Erzsbet Kdr mistakenly sees in this passivity. Indeed, none of the
characters in Farkasverem is as active (and successful) as Ferk is.
Ferks reinterpretation of the ancient Csaba legend supports his activism,
which is indebted in part to the ideas of interwar Transylvanianism. In the legend he heard from his grandfather, Csaba, youngest son of Attila, had settled
his people in Transylvania, but had to return to their ancient home to get help
against attackers. When the news reached him on the way that the Szkelys in
Transylvania were in dire need, he returned with his warriors, and their hoofs
created the sparks we now see as the Milky Way (called in the Hungarian version Warriors Way). Csaba saved the Szkelys and left again, but promised
that he would return whenever he was needed (3738).
At the end of the novel, Ferk reinterprets the legend: recklessness, quarrels, and prejudice suppress a secret idea that exists in all Szkelys (Hungarians). However, people in great danger rediscover Csabas ancient law that all
dangers can be overcome if love of peace, work, and truth break the seal of the
secret. Just as Csabas warriors returned in the legend, so too, cohesion, inventiveness, love of work, and self-assurance will bring victory and permit
everybody to live in peace with everybody else.
A somewhat cloying sermon, coming from an idealized Szkely hero. Still,
its message is more palatable than the bitter-shrill messages that emerge from
the novels that Wass wrote subsequently.
3. Against the Intruders: 19401945

Wass portrays the 1940 re-annexation of Northern Transylvania in a thinly
disguised autobiographical first-person narrative titled Jnnek! (They are
Coming!), published still the same year. The story follows the growing hopes
of the Transylvanian Hungarians, the final devastations, robberies, and
murders of the retreating Romanian troops (Turcsny, lete 15), and the ecstatic reception of the liberating Hungarian troops that behave impeccably.
Wass was always conspicuously silent about the atrocities committed by the
arriving Hungarian troops, which included the authenticated killing of several
Romanians and Jews around his estate. The question is whether Wass and his
father were implicated in the murders. Wass himself has always denied any
responsibility, claiming that the troops arrived on September 11 at his family
estate and he was absent between the 14th and the 25th (Turcsny, lete 15).
550
Nevertheless, a hastily convened Romanian court in Cluj/Kolozsvr condemned in 1946 both him and his father to death in absentia. Whether the
trial was fair is an open question. Whether Wass will be ever exonerated in
court is a political question, not one of truth. We shall probably never find out
exactly Albert Wass did or did not do in 1940.
However, we may get some idea of how Wasss ideological orientation
changed as a result of the events, once his journalistic publication between
1940 and 1945 becomes available. The manipulators of his legacy are understandably not eager to explore his dispersed archive that very likely contains
some embarrassing texts. According to his own statement, Wass became in
March 1941 the literary editor of the Kolozsvr paper Ellenzk (Opposition),
which was of high quality in the previous decades but sharply veered to the
right under the editorship of Gyula Zathurecky. Wass claims that he himself
actually became the chief editor of the daily between March and early July
1943, after Zathurecky was drafted (Turcsny, lete 16). However, Wass published during those years only two short stories in the paper, and research
conducted for the present article found no other traces of his name in the
paper during this period, whereas Zathurecky regularly published lead articles
and travel reports in it during the first half of 1943. Involvement with Ellenzk
seems another mystification of Wass, together with his claim that he resigned
from his post when two Gestapo men appeared in the office (in 1943!) to take
over the paper.
In the absence of non-fictional prose, we must try to distill Wasss position
during 194044 from his fictional works: the loosely interconnected story collection A titokzatos ozbak (The Mysterious Roe-Buck), published in 1941, and,
above all, the two-volume sequence Mire a fk megnonek (By the Time the Trees
Grow up) and A kastly rnykban (In the Shadow of the Castle). The former
returns to some of Wasss earlier themes from a more nationalistic perspective,
and opens mystifying visions of a pristine Transylvanian nature of woods,
brooks, and mountains. The young boy, who focalizes the early parts of the
text, dislikes the stone-Babel of cities (37), and not only because they are
crowded. A trip to Hungary opens his eyes to recognize that the Romanians are rootless foreigners, visiting usurpers. These unkempt and disorderly people run around and shout; they are unable to keep order because
God has not appointed them to do it; they are puzzled by power, for it accidentally fell in their lap. They make noise because they fear the quiet peace of
the soil, which conceals unknown, black laws of past and future, of blood and
culture. Even the stones of the houses radiate letters of an alien history they
cannot decipher. They are pushy guests that destroy and defile the world
that they do not possess and cannot be proud of. But the boy prophetically
551
foresees (with the hindsight of the writer) that this will end one day: They will
slink away, these debauching insatiable ones, these scoundrels and clowns, the
whole comedian troop that forced its way to the stage of history to produce a
new drama and did not get further than buffoonery. Anticipating the Hungarian reoccupation of the land, boy knows he has birthrights to the white
peaks of the mountains (7475). For now, he experiences a silent, dark, pure
and transcendental nature when he encounters the mysterious roe-buck. The
last story, titled Msule, takes place after the turnover, when power is exercized by the rightful owner. In conclusion, the narrator addresses the old Romanian Msule of the mountains: we are again in Hungary. What do you
say? He regrets the tactless question, but the old man chimes in: it was always
like that. The Hungarians were the lords here since the beginning of the world.
The Romanians? He waves them away and leaves (119).
Mire a fk megnonek (By the Time the Trees Grow up)

Before we turn to the texts of Mire a fk megnonek and A kastly rnykban, we
must make a bibliographical correction. In Ildik Balzss Wass bibliography
the first edition of Mire a fk megnonek is listed as 1940 (item 135), but no such
edition can be found in the Hungarian libraries, and the earliest reviews of the
book are from 1942. The matter is of some importance, because a 1940 edition would imply that it was written before the re-annexation of Northern
Transylvania. The content itself makes this highly unlikely.
These two novels delineate Wasss view of Transylvanian history from the
post-1848 years until the eve of World War I, antecedents of the age portrayed
in Farkasverem. Here, as there, the Hungarians, especially the landowner class,
are shown to be guilty for losing Transylvania to Romania, but in the new
double novel the Hungarian conflicts and failures are overshadowed by the
pressures that the intruding Romanian, German/Austrian, and Jewish newcomers exert on the Szkelys with help from outside.
The heroes of Mire a fk megnonek are Baron Istvn Varjassy and his wife
Minka from Mezovarjas. Upon returning from Kolozsvr, after the defeat of
the 184849 Hungarian revolution, they find that their castle, their stables,
and their church had been burned down and plundered by Romanians, who
even excoriated their overseer alive. The story, which encompasses the 1850s
and 60s, reaching into the first years of the Dual Monarchy after the Compromise of 1867, portrays how the Baron and his wife resettle. The Szkelys find
themselves besieged from below by the Romanians and suppressed from
above by the Austrian military and administrative rulers who use the Roma-
552
nians as pawns against the Hungarians. The Varjassys intensely dislike all intruders, be they Romanians, Jews, Germans, or Austrians. They decide not to
rebuild the castle but to settle in a modest homestead itself a decision that
the social climbers, even their own children, cannot understand. The narrator
identifies with the hard-working, severe, brave, and just couple, and pours
savage irony on the Romanians.
The most important Romanians of the novel are the villagers Mitru and Indrei Muresan (the Greek-orthodox popa) and Szndu Bcs, the Dascal, who
lives in the neighboring village Doboj. The three of them led the mob that
burned and pillaged the estate and killed the overseer. Once they hear about
Varjassys return, most Romanians (and Hungarians) readily surrender the
booty they carried away, but Varjassy has to go personally to Indrei, Mitru,
and Bcs. Indrei, servile to god and those in power (15), relinquishes what he
took, though his wife, unkindly characterized as an aged dwarf peony tossed
out of its vase, tossed around at the foot of the wall amidst garbage (16), puts
up a mild resistance. Mitrus fat house looks like a big, overweight frog that
gobbled up the soil until it became sluggish and overextended, hunching at
the end of the wide plot with protruding [guvadt] eyes (17). When he puts up
resistance, Varjassy strikes him down with an axe.
The Barons visit to Bcs occasions a narratorial portrayal of the Romanian
Doboj, a village hiding amidst steep and dreadfully ugly mountain slopes
that nearly suffocate it. The details of the picture constitute a psychology of
the Romanians in Transylvania:
Its houses, pressed together in pain, piled on each other, its streets became bent, and the
whole village was like a heap of hatred and bitterness. Nothing straight in it: neither its
streets, neither its brook, neither the intertwining line of its houses, neither the direction
of the gardens, nor that of the fences. There was nothing open: its streets were continuously hiding from themselves, the brook was loafing under shores, willows, and walls,
the houses turned away from each other slyly. (31)
Romanian slyness, hatred, bitterness, and bending resist the Barons Hungarian directness, openness, and honesty. To make sure that the Hungarians
are not blamed for the helter-skelter dishonesty of the village, the narrator
adds that Dobojs primordial inhabitants (read Szkelys) had solid houses
on wide garden plots. Due to wars and soldiery in Austrian service, few of
those are left. The old and ineffective parson bris Bibarc still preaches in
the Hungarian church (echoes of Csaba), but the wooden Greek-orthodox
church of Dascal Bcs dominates today, be it with a deep-seated inferiority
complex: the Romanians copied their original Trans-Carpathian church, but
since they had to use oak instead of native pine, the new church became too
heavy.
553
A Romanian psycho-history reveals that the psychology of the village

houses represent more than just a counterpart to the Barons character:
It resembled some worn-out, sad bird settling with tiredness, with drooping wings; a
foreign bird, some bird that lost its way. That small wooden church was the bird of
people that lost their way [] of people that had to flee far from their home because of
the Turks and the Tatars to find work and life on foreign peoples soil. This is why they
built their houses so close to each other, almost clinging to each other, so helter-skelter
and disorderly. Already the first settlement, like the church, was a tired foreign bird that
landed for a rest and never thought for a moment to build a nest on foreign grounds. It
settled only because it had to stop somewhere, it had to look for a job and work to stay
alive and to be able to return once. [] Without love they built small and gloomy mud
houses, just good enough against rain and frost until time comes to return home. (36)
However, the narrator adds, this original Romanian Heimweh faded with time;
the small foreign huts merged with the wide gardens of the Hungarian population and started to meddle in the affairs of the big houses: They started to
behave like somebody who feels at home (37):
Instead of the warmth of pure peacefulness, hatred settled in the settlers souls, caustic
and bitter hatred against the alien people that had received them, against the alien lords
that gave them work, and the sadness of remembering the distant home slowly intermingled with this hatred. It mixed in, slowly and quite unconsciously transforming the
images, and suddenly it seemed as if this soil had been the old home, the old country. In
the mirrors of the slanted windows of the temporary huts, it suddenly seemed that they
had been here the true primordial inhabitants, and those who lived in the old big houses
were the aliens who moved in on them, crowded them out, and suppressed them. This is
how the hatred against the Hungarians started. (37)
These passages constitute Wasss first fictional formulation of an ethnic history that he was to repeat countless times, in his fiction as well as his journalism. We need not contest here its primitive psychologism and historical inaccuracies. Suffice to note that the Romanians suppression of their true
intruder identity needed a complementary explanation of how they acquired
power. How did these poor and powerless Romanians become a political factor in Transylvania? How did the ressentiment become a threat? Within the logic
of the novel and Wasss ideology, the key factor is Austrias imperial power:
Vienna continued to be in collusion with the Romanians (and the other minorities in Hungary) after the 184849 war, and even after the 1867 Compromise that allowed Hungary to participate in the Monarchy. The novel suggests
that in the final decades of the century Vienna continued to undermine
Transylvanias traditional Hungarian culture by encouraging also the intrusion of the German/Austrian bureaucrats and the Jews. Wass completely ignores thereby, here and elsewhere, Transylvanias old urban German/Saxon
culture, which had been a major source of its well-being. In the final pages of
554
the novel Varjassy and his wife are out of touch with the brave, new, and cosmopolitan world of their children, and of Austro-Hungary in general. Varjassys growing preoccupation with death signals the passing away of his simple
and old-fashioned patriarchal patriotism.
Could the negative perception of all those Romanians, Jews, and Austrians
merely be focalized from the perspective of Varjassy and his wife? Could the
narrator (and in this case the author as well) have a different worldview? Is
there, perhaps, an ironic discrepancy between narrator and the protagonists,
as it so often happens in the best nineteenth-century novels? Not here, in a
novel lorded over by an all-powerful narrator. The passages we have quoted
about the Romanian village, its houses, and its inhabitants, are clearly marked
as reflections of the narrator, not as Varjassys perceptions. We cannot read
them as free indirect discourses, as spoken by the narrator but actually seen by
Varjassy. Vision and words coincide, the narrator is behind and above his fiction, and certifies Varjassys perception of the world.
A kastly rnykban (In the Castles Shadow)

The fictional time of this sequel to Mire a fk megnonek ends roughly in 1898,
after Hungarys millennial celebrations (191), but an epilogue (19899), dated
sometime after 1920, offers a glimpse of the future under Romanian rule. The
novel reveals what went wrong, and what the right attitude should have been,
but it refrains from claiming that better politics could have prevented the
national catastrophe of losing Transylvania to Romania.
In the Dual Monarchy, the old Varjassys are gradually pushed into the background. These followers of Kossuth remain 100 % Hungarians: they reject the
Compromise with Austria, for it brings all kinds of foreign riff-raff into
Transylvania and stimulates technological and social changes they distrust.
Their son Gbor, who was elected to the parliament already in the previous
book, represents the new and fashionable Hungarian attitudes towards these
changes. He rebuilds the old castle against the wishes of his parents, and takes a
distance from the poor Hungarians. Gbor becomes the Lord Lieutenant of
the County (foispn), and he welcomes the foreigners because they (at least some
of them) bring European culture to the isolated Szkely communities and because he is convinced that all those Germans, Austrians, Jews, Romanians, and
Slovaks will gradually assimilate and become no less patriotic than the indigenous Hungarians. The plot of the story, the characterizations, the narrators portrayals and commentaries, all make clear, however, that Gbor has it all wrong.
For moments, he realizes this, but he is unable to draw the consequences. He
555
suspects, for instance, that the Romanian leaders are in secret collusion with
unspecified Austrian powers to buy and to convert Hungarian land into Romanian one, but he is too weak and undecided to act upon this insight.
Skipping the other novels that Wass published during the war years Egyedl a vilg ellen (Alone against the World; 1943), and Vrben s viharban (In Blood
and Storm; 1943) we give a brief account of his play Tavaszi szl (Spring
Wind), which was to be staged in the National Theater of Budapest around
Christmas 1944, when the city was already under Soviet siege.
Tavaszi szl (Spring Wind)

The play covers the years 191019, and blames the Monarchys Hungarian
politicians and Hungarian ruling class for adopting a liberal attitude towards
intruders. Imre, a lover of the soil, the woods, the mountains, and a simple
peasant girl, accepts his Hungarian responsibility when called upon, and he
rises to the post of county Lord Lieutenant and member of the parliament,
while marrying the former Lord Lieutenants daughter. At the outbreak of
World War I, he violently disagrees, however, with the Hungarian politicians.
He claims that the Romanians receive secret funds to buy up land and that the
Jews were allowed to take over commerce, whereas the poor Hungarians
could only to emigrate. The Hungarians are too hospitable and chivalrous to
the impolite intruders (42, 44). As Lord Lieutenant, Imre arrests a Romanian popa who agitates against the Hungarians, but the Minister of Interior
releases him (59). The ruling class has become European, and Imres wife
does not understand that the holiest secret and law of human beings is the
nation, the connectedness through race and blood (59). The French general
who arrives in 1919 to oversee the transfer of Transylvania to Romania claims
that the Hungarians ruled over the other people too much (66), Imre responds that they stupidly gave up ruling because they accepted the rhetoric of
human rights, European rights, and humanism (66). France would not have
allowed that infiltrating nomadic people (telepes-np) should suddenly join
another nation and take its land. Shouting inebriated, the Hungarians throw
away their weapons, or they join the Jews as barking dogs, under the leadership of Krolyi [Minister President of the 1918 pink revolutionary government] (71). Imre returns to his mountains.
Though the plot of the play differs from the narrative of the novels just discussed, the types and ideological perspectives perfectly dovetail. We have to
ask, then, whether Hungarys second disastrous war of the twentieth century
in which Wass had participated came to modify this worldview.
556
4. Perspectives from Exile in Europe: 19451951

Wass lived under difficult circumstances during the immediate postwar years,
but he was surprisingly productive in fiction writing. Apart from the stories
we have discussed, he published the novels Adjtok vissza a hegyeimet! (Return
me my Mountains!), Ember az orszgt szln (Man at the Roadside), and Tizenhrom almafa (Thirteen Apple Trees). He also wrote Rzkgy (Copper Snake),
which was published posthumously.
In the first two of these novels, Wass abandons his traditional external narrator to allow a protagonist to tell his story. No doubt, he was motivated by a
desire to convey more intensely and personally the tragic life stories, but he
probably wanted also to prevent this way that controversial narratorial statements and observations are attributed to himself.
Adjtok vissza a hegyeimet! (Return me My Mountains!)

The novel opens with an address to the President of the Association of
Human Rights, Eleanor Roosevelt, and all members of the UN Assembly: the
narrator claims that his human rights were violated in a war that was fought
with the slogan of human rights. The book is conspicuously silent about
the atrocities that were committed against the human rights of Poles, Czechs,
Russians, Jews, Gypsies, and many others.
The Szkely narrator has two important childhood encounters up in the
Transylvanian mountains: Anik, whom he marries after a shy and lengthy
friendship, and Dudurks, a well-intentioned fat Romanian boy, son of a
smith who came from somewhere behind the mountains, still before the
war (73). Dudurks helps the boy to acquire a gun (forbidden for Hungarians, a major infringement on a persons human rights according to Wass),
but the boys father is killed by a boar and the boy is jailed for illegal gun possession. Upon his release, the orphan (his mother had died earlier) settles with
his sister and brother in the woods, supporting the three by burning coal and
selling the meat of the beasts he shoots with another gun acquired with the
help of Dudurks.
After Northern Transylvanias re-annexation to Hungary, the Dudurks
family fears Hungarian retribution, but the young narrator assures his friend:
We do not harm anybody [] in Hungary things like this [suppression]
never existed. I know it from my father. There will not be any either. In Hungary, all human beings are equal (8990). To be on the safe side, father Dudurks takes the Hungarian orphans into his house, and claims he too is Hun-
557
garian (9394). The narrators sister marries the Dudurks boy, though this is
unacceptable to their brother, who wants a war so that some people disappear. To the question what if he will be one of them, he answers, the world
here will belong then to the Jews, the lords, and the Dudurks (112).
The protagonist reluctantly obeys the draft notice for it is a law of the
country that made a free person of him (120). In spite of his doubts and his revulsion at violence, he shoots a Russian, for otherwise the Hungarians will be
eliminated by others, the Romanians, the Russians, and everybody who can
step on us (132). His unit is demolished but he joins other retreating Hungarian troops under the command of an ensign who thinks that the Hungarians and Germans win or perish together (15557). The Soviets capture them,
but he escapes and returns home, where now the communists rule.
The rest of the plot consists of interlocking horror stories. The narrators
house was burned down, his wife and child killed; Dudurks did not intervene
when the Soviet soldiers raped his wife. The Dudurks family changes sides
again, but is, nevertheless, deported (17273). A communist smith, who led
the Soviets through the narrators house and thus became unwittingly responsible for his wife death, witnesses how the communists massacre churchgoers. The new Commissar of his village, a Jew imported from Mramaros,
tortures people by hammering nails under their fingernails and pouring salt in
their wounds (198). The smith kills the Commissar for torturing his wife to
death, but his children are deported to Russia and he loses one eye in the subsequent torture (206207). He joins the narrator and his outlaws, and the two
of them visit the Commissar of the narrators village, another living devil
(21118) who also comes from the Trans-Carpathian region. Disgusted with
himself, the Commissar tells his life story and willingly accepts their death
sentence by hanging himself. The narrators brother becomes a judge in the
new system, but quickly loses his faith: he is arrested (17475, 190) and becomes a neo-Nazi upon his release (234).
A parish minister finally urges the narrator to escape in order to tell the
world about the suffering Transylvanians. Then, the minister believes, our
brothers in blood who work in the West will come, like Prince Csaba, with the
all-sweeping force of truth, morality, and love to save us from the claws of
evil! Alleluia, alleluia, blessed be the Lords name (226)! We see, the Prince
Csaba legend has undergone another metamorphosis on its journey from
Csaba to Adjtok vissza a hegyeimet!.
Jnos Kereszthegyi did not miss the opportunity to weave into his review
of Kicsi Anna srkeresztje a paragraph on Adjtok vissza a hegyeimet!, a novel
that disturbed him on account of its anti-American, anti-democratic, hateful,
and history-falsifying perspectives:
558
This novel slyly and dangerously wraps into the tearful sighs of a Transylvania nostalgia
the writers deliberate distortions, and it presents things as if the Americans should be
charged for the Russian invasion and brutalities, as well as for the airplane bombings, not
the fact that there existed in the world an amok called Hitler, and that Hungary became a
servant of this amuck-runner with its nation-betraying governments, and, especially,
with a bandit called Szlasi. Not a word is said about them in the novel! This book is agitating between the lines even in its emigration section, against America, and against the
International Refugee Organization that is supported with American money.
Ember az orszgt szln (Man at the Roadside)

The story is introduced by a roadside encounter between two men who flee
the Russians troops. The younger one, the man at the roadside, tells his life
story to the older one, an officer from the upper class. The recent reprint of
the novel by Krter Publishers (2000), which follows a 1993 Canadian edition,
also contains an Epilogue (13151), which narrates another encounter that
takes place in Florida in 1977, between the writer and the grandson of the
roadside man. I could not inspect the first European and US editions from
195053 (Balzs nos. 32022), but I am all but certain that they do not contain
the Epilogue. It pretends to be a true event, but contains enough historical
references to date its writing beyond the 1950s. Neither Ildik Balzss bibliography nor the Krter edition notes that the Epilogue was added later.
This bibliographical fact is of some importance, because the Epilogue
redefines the novels ideological orientation. The main story shows some
analogy to Adjtok vissza a hegyeimet (and other later novels), inasmuch as it
shows how a young Hungarian struggles to survive in post-1919 Romanian
Transylvania. In this novel, however, the social stratification of the Hungarian/Szkely community plays a more important role. Trained as an engineer
and employed until the changeover in the forest administration, the roadside
man loses his job in 1919 and he too has to hand in his gun. Forced into the
mountains with his family, he starts scorching wood, and builds up a flourishing business with logging and sawmills. He becomes dissatisfied with his
successful business ventures and turns into a carpenter (79), which causes
conflicts within the family rather than with the Romanian authorities. The
heart of the protagonists narration concerns the snobbery of urban Hungarian society, and the discovery that this has infected even his wife and children.
He sends his daughter Ilonka to a prestigious girls school in Budapest,
where she get ostracized when she gives away that his father is a carpenter.
Later she goes to medical school in Kolozsvr/Cluj, marries a Romanian surgeon, and goes with him to Trans-Carpathian Romania. They have commu-
559
nist sympathies, but after the Soviet takeover, before dying, she sends a last
message to her father that her creed was mistaken. Jancsi, the older son,
studies engineering in Budapest, returns to Kolozsvr, and makes a lot of
money. He joins the Arrow Cross movement, and calls his sister a traitor for
marrying a Romanian (110). When he is called to Budapest in 1944 to manage
the redistribution of Jewish property, his father disowns him in a violent confrontation (122124). Not that he cares for the Jews, for he knows that they
are a great disease of this world (122), but he opposes genocide and is disgusted with his sons greedy robbery. Lajos, the other son, studies in Kolozsvr/Cluj and also settles and marries there, but he is drafted in military and
perishes in the Ukraine, leaving a wife and a son behind. The man at the
roadside is fleeing to the West only in order to save his only grandson, his
hope and legacy for a better Transylvania.
The pre-1945 experiences of this roadside man are comparable to those of
the protagonist in Adjtok vissza a hegyeimet!, and both men are a-political.
However, the patriotism of the roadside man is more skeptical and critical,
and his outlook is somewhat more humane. He does not regard Hungarys reannexation of Northern Transylvania as liberation, but as an invasion of an arrogant military and administrative power that has little understanding of the
local conditions (99104). The new regime shows him that the Hungarian ruling classes have not learned from the failure of their system in 191819: they
lead the country into a second bankruptcy (105). These are his central preoccupations; conflicts with the Romanians do occur but do not dominate his
life. Indeed, while nobody helps his daughter when she is socially rejected in
the elite school, she is helped by her future Romanian husband when she is
been beaten up by the Romanian fascists.
All these liberal, humane, and non-patriotic sentiments evaporate, however, in the Epilogue, which stages a meeting in 1977 between the author Wass
(alter ego of the conversation partner at the roadside) and the roadside-mans
grandson. The grandfather brought him up while working as a porter at the
Munich railroad station. After finishing school, the boy and his grandfather
return to Transylvania. The authorities send the grandfather to relatives in the
mountains, while the grandson is drafted and is badly mistreated for being a
Hungarian. Having served, he returns to his grandfather and wants to work
near him, but his assignment is to work in Bucharest. When his grandfather
tries to intervene, he is beaten to death. The young man works four years in
Bucharest, but manages to escape, and continues to carry his grandfathers
belief that fear can never fully extinguish hope. It seems obvious that Wass
added the hate-filled nationalistic Epilogue because of Ceausescu.
560
Tizenhrom almafa (Thirteen Apple Trees)

Wasss last European book was also published in Buenos Aires (1952). Apparently it was never published in the US, though Wass published in Florida a
sequel to it, The Red Star Wanes (1965).
The protagonist of this story is Mzsi Tnczos Csuda, a gob, a proverbial
simple but clever and witty Szkely type whom ron Tamsi made famous. The
action spans the years between Northern Transylvanias Hungarian re-annexation and the beginning of the communist rule in 1944. The re-annexation is
portrayed here, as in Ember az orszgt szln, with greater complexity than in Jnnek!, and not just because the new border cuts through Mzsis apple orchard.
The liberating Hungarian soldiers find Mzsis miserable hut uncultured
(24), and the imported Hungarian administration has little understanding of the
Szkely mentality. Mzsi listens skeptically when a Hungarian demagogue from
the homeland tells his Szkely blood brothers: There will be no more Vlach
villainy here! There will be no more Szkely children mortally whipped, no more
girls tortured to death! We, the Szkely leaders who bled and suffered with you,
guarantee that the road on which we now lead you will get you to true resurrection! (63) Mzsis reservations about such rhetoric resemble the particularistic spirit of the interwar Transylvanianist movement that Wass actually
did not join, though his sentiments were particularist and anti-Budapest. Mzsi
resists when right-wing agitators try to sign him up for their cause (6365), but
he must enlist in the Hungarian army that invades the Soviet Union (82). In
contrast to some of Wasss other novels, service in the Hungarian army is shown
here to be miserable, due in good part to the sadism of the officers. In one case,
this leads even to an insubordination (115), which is brutally suppressed.
The Jewish question emerges, as in Csaba and other Wass stories, on a train.
Mzsi, on furlough, sits with an elderly Hungarian man, a super-nationalist
young Romanian women, and a young man with a Jewish complexion, who
makes jokes and ironic remarks about the Germans and the war. The woman
finally runs out of the compartment shouting Jewish jampec [smart aleck/
pimp] (148). Shortly thereafter a group of better-dressed students penetrate
the compartment, shouting Out with the Moses people! (149), but Mzsi
and the elderly Hungarian defend the Jewish youth. At the next station, the
Jew opens the window and shouts for help. When the police arrive, Mzsi and
the old man refuse to testify; the old man is no friend of the Jews and saved
the youth only because he does not want to get mixed up in murder cases. The
Jewish youngster quickly leaves at the next station. The gist of this rather mild
Jew anecdote is: do not think we like you, even if we defend you. As in Kicsi
Anna, the Jew is loud and ungrateful.
561
5. Fiction, Academia, Publishing: Florida 195798

In 1957, Wass moved from Ohio to Florida, where he received a teaching
position at a cadet school. According to his short c.v., he was subsequently
asked to teach in the Foreign Language Department at the University of
Florida, Gainesville, and remained in that post until his retirement (alternately
dated as 1970 and 1972: Tucsny, lete 20 and 22). He continued to live in
Astor, Florida until his suicide in 1998.
A funtineli boszorkny (The Witch of Funtinel)

During his four-decade stay in the US, Wass wrote a plethora of newspaper articles, novels, poems, and fairy tales for children, though with little success.
Many regard the three-volume novel cycle A funtineli boszorkny (The Witch of
Funtinel) as his best work, a judgment to which he himself occasionally lent
credence. Published in 1959, simultaneously in Buenos Aires and Cleveland, it
differs from most of Wasss later works in that ethnic conflict and anti-Semitism appear here only on the margin. The Witch is actually a little Romanian
orphan, raised for a number of years by her grandfather in the mountainous
woods. When he is arrested and jailed, she manages to support herself alone.
In spite of, or rather because of, her unity with nature and mysterious supernatural power, she repeatedly gets into conflict with the village societies
below and the technological civilization (railroad, lumber mills) that encroaches on pristine nature. She is regarded as a witch because she can often
predict the future and because she is cursed with the destructive power of a
femme fatale: all men who fall in love with her must die. The novel confronts
civilization with nature and rationalism with irrational passion, and since
Wass regards Jews as the symbols of urban capitalism it inevitably mobilizes
also his anti-Semitism, as the following brief discussion of two scenes from
the third volume shows.
The first scene of the third volume portrays the misfired inauguration of a
new railroad line in the Maros valley: those in power prepare a feast but the
villagers and mountain people perceive the approaching loc is an emissary of
hell:
It came smoking and black, a big construction, a godless machine; it spat black smoke,
and its rattling slowly filled the valley, filled the air, filled the world, filled the ears and
brain of the people, and it was truly as if the devil himself came on wheels up the Maros.
All of them saw it, and nobody had a word to say. There was terrible stillness among the
people. Only the ugly black carriage grew ever bigger, it alone thundered, and rattled,
562
puffed and belched that merciless, filthy, black smoke towards the clean-scrubbed
summer sky. As it approached in the sparklingly beautiful sunshine, gradually grew and
approached, it was as if a big grimy worm would keep rattling into the beautiful and
neatly-carved mountains; some obscene and dangerous worm, some frightening devilbeast that devours everything that is beautiful and uglifies everything that is pure. (3: 7)
Assisted by the priests and popas, the Baron extols all the benefits the railroad
is going to bring, but when the people are invited to eat and drink they politely
refuse and get on their way homeward. The representatives of the old order
(nobility and clergy) are accompanied by the real movers of the new order, the
officials of the railroad, and, above all, the representative of the new capitalist
order, the Jewish Mr. Schwarz, a former grocer but now the owner of the sawmill, who will profit most from the railroad. The greedy and belligerent
workers of his mill have also been imported from somewhere. Mr. Schwarz,
tiny and potbellied, runs around unsuccessfully to save the feast: the reddened
little fat grocer nervously wipes the fatty sweat on his forehead with his
pudgy white hands (9). Capitalism and industrialization, led by a reprehensive
Jew and tolerated by the old order, tragically defile here natures purity.
The confrontation is replayed a few pages later, but now in a comic-erotic
key that allows a reversal of the power relations. Just when the beautiful, natural, and young witch of Funtinel stretches herself naked on a hot stone next
to a cool brook (32), a man on the other side of the brook disturbes her. He is
a round headed fat little man wearing gentlemans suit, wide trousers, striped
shirt, halters, and a coat on his arm. His stomach protrudes, his head is
adorned with a strange, round straw hat. A vile smirk spreads over his face
(32). Our Schwarz, for it is him, shouts to her something she doesnt understand because of the spalshing water, and when she crosses over to him
(naked, of course), he repeatedly pinches her with the same fatty disgusting
smirk. She ignores his sexual advances and prepares to return to the other
side. Scared by the prospect of losing his prey, he offers her a forint, breathing
heavily, reddened, and with a slimy mouth. She giggles that his paunch makes
him look pregnant, but he aggressively grabs her arm and reminds her that he
owns the woods. She coyly invites him to undress and lay his clothes next to
hers on the other banks, which he follows with his usual disgusting smirk.
She grabs both piles of clothes, jumps over the rocks and disappears, teasing,
laughing, and ridiculing the man left behind. Our Transylvanian Rhine maided
fooled the shivering and naked Mr. Schwarz/Alberich, who must finally be
fetched by the gendarmes. Wagners allegorical anti-Semitism is made explicit
here by means of the mans name.
563
Publishing Ventures
After his move to Florida, Wass undertook a number of publishing ventures
and became deeply involved in Hungarian exile/migr politics, among other
things as President of the Transylvanian World Society (Erdlyi Vilgszvetsg), Vice President of the Hungarian American Society (Amerikai Magyar
Szvetsg), and President of the Kossuth-Kiad, a Cleveland publishing
house. He supported the ill-famed Senator Joseph McCarthy and the mentioned Senator Robert A. Taft ( Jzan 1: 24; Turcsny, lete 84), and later he
pinned his hope on the conservative republican presidential candidate Barry
Goldwater, who lost against Lyndon Johnson ( Jzan 1: 6870).
What exactly was the duty of Wass at the University of Florida, and what, if
any, relation did his foundation and his publishing activities have with the university? As of early 2008, the contested English version of the Wikipedia internet article on Wass claimed that he became professor of German, French,
European literature and history at the University of Florida in Gainesville,
whereas the corresponding Hungarian version soberly noted merely that he
was engaged in the language laboratory of the University of Florida. Both articles are in a constant process of revision: at the end of 2007 the Hungarian
Wikipedia text still added to the text just quoted: (he handled the magnetic
tapes)! Since no serious university would have employed anybody in as many
and divergent fields as listed in the English version, the Hungarian version
may come closer to the truth.
From the mid-1960s onward, Wasss main concern was to set up journals,
publishing houses, and a Research Institute, in order to cultivate a Hungarian tradition among the Hungarian-Americans, and, more importantly, to reveal to the American readers and politicians what he regarded as the historical truth about Transylvania and the plight of Transylvanian Hungarians. He
conspicuously failed on both accounts, and became increasingly frustrated
with the passage of time.
Wasss first, and perhaps most important venture was the publishing house
Amerikai Magyar Szpmves Ch (American Hungarian Guild of the Arts),
which he launched in May 1964 with the primary aim of providing books in
English for the American public ( Jzan 1: 8284, 131). The imprint of the
Guild publications listed sometimes Toronto, sometimes Gainesville, and at
other times Astor, FL (Wasss home) as the place of publication. According to
an article of September 3, 1966, the Guild had published by then five studies
and two novels ( Jzan 1: 16667, 195; Ildik Balzss bibliography includes a
longer list [5556]). Gyula Zathureczkys book on Transylvania was sent to all
US Congressmen and Senators, and Wass repeatedly claimed that as a result
564
(of a print-run of five-hundred copies!) discussions on Transylvania in Congress, at universities, and elsewhere came to use reliable information ( Jzan
98).
As to fiction, the Guild planned to publish only novels that would acquaint American readers with the Hungarian problems, with the Hungarian
way of life, and, above all, with the Hungarian sufferings [] Our aim is
simple and clear: we bring the Hungarian problems to the general consciousness of the American public ( Jzan 1: 99). However, the Guild published
only two novels (Damnation Row and The Red Star Wanes), both by Wass himself
in both Hungarian and English, contrary to the announced policy. Indeed,
Wass announced in September 1978 that the Guild would publish henceforth
mostly books in Hungarian, for it would be unjust and inappropriate if fivehundred old, pensioned Hungarians continued to carry on their shoulders the
burden and the responsibility of enlightening the Anglo-Saxon public ( Jzan
2: 284).
The Guild was related to two further institutions led by Wass: the Danubian Press ( Jzan 2: 17), launched in 1967, and the Danubian Research and Information Center (Dunatji Kutatsi s Informcis Kzpont). The aim of
the latter was to provide the press, the politicians, and the universities with
information concerning the past, the geography, the geology, the cultural and
political situation of the Danube Basin, and to search for and to work out
the feasible road that leads towards the reconciliation and harmonious cooperation of the people in the Danube Basin ( Jzan 1: 93; cf. also 12122). Unfortunately, for both internal and external reasons, the actual work at the
Center did not further this noble conciliatory aim. Wass consistently blamed
the world, above all the disinterested Hungarian-Americans, for the centers
difficulties. The Hungarian American Society rejected the project from its
very start, and the sources for potential American subsidies thus dried up
( Jzan 1: 93). Many doubted that Wass had the temper and vision to carry out
such a conciliatory work and the Centers actual activities confirmed this
skepticism.
Wass announced the launching of the Center in November 1965, though
the actual starting date seems to have been spring 1966 ( Jzan 1: 11315 vs.
165). What exactly the Center researched, what ties it had with the Guild, and,
above all, what its relation was to the University of Florida remain unclear to
this date. The central project seems to have been the five-volume Hungarian
Package with accounts of Hungarys geography, history, and culture, as well
as the legends, tales, dances, folklore, and literature of the Hungarian people.
Scheduled for an October 1966 appearance (anniversary of the Revolution) in
five-thousand, and possibly ten-thousand copies ( Jzan 1: 127), it finally ap-
565
peared in four volumes between 1969 and 1972 under the title Hungarian
Heritage Series, with a print run of two-thousand. The Heritage Series included Ildik Jobbgys volume on folk dances (1969); Bla Vrdys history of
Hungary (1969), a reworking of publications by the doyen of the Hungarian
historians, Domokos Kosry; and two collections by Wass himself, one of
Hungarian folk tales (1972), the other of Hungarian legends (1971). The volumes have various degrees of merit, but one may ask how much they have furthered the announced aim to further the cooperation between the people in
the Danube basin. Take, for instance, Wasss own introductory remarks to the
volumes he edited. Had he genuinely looked for the common elements in the
folk traditions of the Danube basin, he could have profited from Bla Bartk,
who found early in the century that folklore in this region was something of a
common good, for it circulated throughout the ages over the borders and
among various people. But Wass did not know, or perhaps did not want to
know, about this. For him, folk tales spoke the soul of the nation, and each
nation had a unique way of expressing itself via such tales (7678).
Wass proudly announced on April 23, 1966 ( Jzan 15354) that the Center
had received a donation of $ 10,000 from a certain Andr Toma for a similar
Romanian Package. I could find no evidence that the Romanian Package
was ever published. Although the President of the University apparently acknowledged Mr. Tomas donation, and the Centers postal address was given
as Anderson Hall, University of Florida, (or, at times as Hungarian Package
Renaissance Publishing 3837 SW 1st Ave.), the University of Florida probably
never recognized officially the Center as part of the university. Nevertheless,
Wass frequently signed as professor at the university or at the universitys research center (e.g. Jzan 1: 109, 138). Wass explicitly pleaded for a Hungarian
Chair at an American university, and he wanted to attach his Danubian Center
to a university. It seems likely that he approached the University of Florida
with these requests, but no evidence on that is available. The Center, the
Guild, and the Danubian Press also published The Transylvanian Quarterly
(197985), The Hungarian Quarterly (198590), and the Central European Forum
(1988?).
Whatever one thinks of Wasss politics and ideology, it must be admitted
that he had the right strategy: in order to carry political and cultural weight in
America, the Hungarian exile and emigrant community would have had to be
united, and concerted efforts would have been needed to reach the American
public, especially the politicians and the academic community. Wass did, indeed, relentlessly work towards these goals, but he was temperamentally and
ideologically the wrong person for the task. He perceived the world in terms
of black-and-white schemas that allowed for no discriminations and compro-
566
mises. His highly charged and often grotesque attacks against his alleged enemies separated him not only from them but also from those that would have
been willing to accompany him part of the way. Within the Hungarian community, his activity was divisive rather than conciliatory.
The problems of Wasss Danubian Basin projects were particularly serious.
Wass may have wanted cooperation, perhaps even a federation, between the
nations of the region, but he would have accepted it only on his terms, i.e.
Hungarian historical, cultural, and political supremacy. Starting from this
premise, he recognized only injustices done to the Hungarians, none that
were inflicted by the Hungarians on the others. The Trianon Peace Treaty
after World War I was, of course, horrendously unjust to Hungary, but by the
time Wass had reached the US it became evident that irredentist demands to
return to the old borders were a pipedream. Wasss own writing was equivocal
on this issue. At times, as in the first of the following passages, he claimed that
only a return of the lost territories could resolve the issue, at other times, as in
the second passage, he would slightly modify his radical standpoint by leaving
a small opening for regional autonomy for minorities:
There is no other way out but to re-annex Transylvania to Hungary, within whose millennial frame the infiltrated or relocated folk groups among them the Vlachs could
develop freely for centuries, could maintain their language, develop their culture, and
could enjoy equal rights with the original inhabitants. (Magyar let, February 5, 1977; qtd.
in Borbndi letrajz 2: 27273, but not included in the Krter editions of Wasss works)
We do not wish to deprive the neighboring nations of their rights, but we insist that what
is Hungarian should remain Hungarian and should return to the nations thousand-year
possession, from the Szkely villages to the Burgenland ones, from the Bcska
[Vojvodina] to Upper Hungary [Slovakia], under just regional self-governance, where it
is needed. ( Jzan 2: 21516; published in Kanadai Magyarsg on May 31, 1969)
The Romanians, the Slovaks, and the Serbs would not recognize the claim that
their territories were Hungarys thousand-year possession, and all of them
would contest the assertion that the minorities used to have equal rights under
Hungarian rule. Wasss irredentism, and his insistence on Hungarian superiority and historical rights, is so radically incompatible with his theory of a
Danubian-Basin reconciliation that one cannot help but suspect that the various Danubian projects merely served to camouflage a Hungarian chauvinist
agenda. No wonder that the Romanian Package and all the others that
should have followed never materialized.
For a brief moment in the 1960s, Wass, like everybody else, admired Ceausescu for his independence from Moscow and for his economic development
program. As soon as it became evident, however, that Ceausescus nationalism involved a ruthless suppression of the minorities, Wass joined others in
567
righteous protest. However, Wasss disdain for the Romanians went much
deeper. Under the title Dracula Rides Again! he published on March 10,
1966 a poorly-written article in English, which outlined his alternative Romanian history for North-American readers as follows:
Roumanian nationalism became a political factor in the first half of the nineteenth century,
and it did not originate in Roumania proper but was artificially created in Transylvania
under the well-known Habsburg slogan [] divide and conquer. From that time on it has
never ceased to exist and to menace the non-Roumanian population of South-Eastern
Europe, whether it took the cloack (sic) of a democratic kingdom, or hid under the red
paint of communism [] single national goal to exterminate all the other ethnic groups
within his (sic) reach, and to build on their graves a single-colored Great Roumenia.
The Roumanians entered the Eastern part of Hungary, called Transylvania, in the 14th,
15th, 16th, and 17th centuries, in small groups, escaping the brutalities of their own landlords across the Carpathians, and asking for asylum. []
These Roumanian settlements enjoyed the privileges of local administrative autonomy, of free cultural development under their own churches, and the use of their own
language. ( Jzan 1: 13839)
In another article, dated March 25, 1967, Wass alleged that the communists
forced very few Romanian writers into exile, that only two were jailed briefly at
home, and that nobody was silenced not, of course, because Ceausescu was
so liberal, but because Romanian writers towed the Party line. As to the Romanian exiles, they helped publishing the works of their colleagues at home,
which proved to Wass that although the Romanian anti-communist emigration regarded the communist government at home as a political and ideological enemy, it nevertheless considered as its duty to maintain cultural contacts in service of a national future ( Jzan 1: 265). Going one step further, Wass
disliked and distrusted the Romanian exiles, including the Romanian contributors to Radio Free Europe ( Jzan 1: 102), because he was convinced that they
were in collusion with the regime at home. On such premises, no self-respecting Romanian would have been willing to work on his Romanian Package.
That Wasss prejudices were not limited to Jews and Transylvanian Romanians is evident from remarks he published in the Kanadai Magyarsg on September 7, 1968, slightly more than two weeks after the Warsaw Pact forces invaded Czechoslovakia. These words must surely have been the most absurd
ones of the Prague Spring:
We have no reason to assume that the spiritual temper of the Czech communist should
be different from the typically Slavic spiritual disposition of the Czech communists
twenty years earlier, who found pleasure in the screaming of tortured women, the dying
cries of ministers nailed to church doors, and the gunning down of unprotected rural inhabitants. We suspect that todays double-sided Czech propaganda actually serves to give
new foundations to a Czech priority in the center of Europe ( Jzan 2: 136)
568
Wasss indiscriminate generalization makes it actually quite difficult to decide

what precisely he means. One could see the invasion as typical of communist
violence which, incidentally, Wass had never witnessed personally. This
would have fitted Wasss image of communism, though not his alleged typically Slavic spiritual disposition since Hungarians participated in the atrocities no less. However, the passage speaks of Czech rather than Russian communists. The preposterous suggestion that the Prague Spring intended to
renew a Czech hegemony in Central Europe shows only that Wass compulsively forced new events into a old right-wing rhetoric, according to which
Slavs have a brutal spiritual disposition, and the Czechs are always out to
dominate the Hungarians. Obviously, reform Communism or Communism with a Human Face were inherently contradictory phrases for Wass, for
whom communists were by definition barbaric. Horrendous scenes of torture
and killing have, as we have seen, a fixed repertoire in Wasss fiction. The historical Liberators were, indeed, raping, robbing and drinking, though
usually not quite as beastly as in Wasss stories. The quoted passage exploits,
however, fictional visions for demagogic purposes.
6. Legacy, Resurrection, and Apotheosis

Wass lived to see as a nonagenarian the political changeover in Hungary and
Romania, but he could no longer return for a visit, and he had little pleasure
with the new regimes, even the Hungarian one, which awarded him in the end
a minor medal in 1994, but, as Wass saw it, was reluctant to grant him a passport (he was mistaken: see Ablonczys Mtoszgyr). For a while it seemed
that his name and his oeuvre would fall into oblivion, but by the late 1990s new
editions of his works started to appear in the Transylvanian Marosvsrhely/
Trgu Mures and Pomz, a village just north of Budapest. The rival publications emerged from factions feuding about the legacy he left behind at his
death in 1998. His sons, who have in possession the manuscripts he left behind in his house, started the Czegei Wass Alaptvny (Czegei Wass Foundation)
to keep his works alive with publications at Marosvsrhely. Wass, who was in
dire financial need in the last years of his life, had signed, however, an agreement in 1989 with Lrnt Zas (Szsz), a California engineer and poet, to publish his works. This led to the more grandiosely named foundation Dr. Grf
Czegei Wass Albert Alaptvny (Dr. Count Czegei Wass Albert Foundation),
which has been behind the highly fruitful publications of the Krter Muhely
Egyeslet, founded in 1991 at Pomz, and presided by Pter Turcsny. The
foundation of the sons initiated a lawsuit, and the High Court of California
569
ruled after a long litigation on June 4, 2008 that Zas broke the contract by not
paying royalties to the heirs, and ordered him to pay more than $ 170 000 in
reparation. According to Krters bookkeeping (statement June 1, 2006), it
earned in the period 20012005 the equivalent of about e 1 000 000 with the
publication of Wasss works! (http://www.demokrata.hu/napi-hir/elutasitottak-a-perujrafelvetelt-wass-albert-ugyeben2008-05-2316:40)
Within ten years, the works of Wass have experienced an incredible boom,
whose Hungarian repercussions far exceed the better-known resurrection of
Sndor Mrais writings. As of December 2007, the catalogue of the Hungarian National Library (Orszgos Szchnyi Knyvtr) lists 242 holdings for
Albert Wass against 469 for Sndor Mrai. However, more than a third of the
works in Mrais list are foreign translations, whereas Wasss list contains only
very few, and most those were commissioned, published, and very likely paid,
by himself. In any case, these translations were produced in small runs.
Serious critical and historical studies are now emerging on Mrai, both in
Hungary and abroad, but in Wasss case the scene has been dominated by the
panegyrics of disciples, admirers, and right-wingers, who often shamelessly
close their eyes to embarrassing things in their masters texts. The historian
Erno Raffay, would, for instance state in all seriousness: one can find no antiJewishness in his novels and other writings. [] in the available articles, writings, and stories published in newspapers one cannot find anti-Semitic trends
and content (190). The fact of the matter is that, apart from some frail vanishing old men, all of Wasss fictional Jews are repellent, be they beastly communists or greedy capitalists.
A handful of journalists and intellectuals have written on Wasss life and
ideology, but, until very recently, literary critics and scholars have conspicuously avoided his work. In the new, three-volume literary history edited by Mihly Szegedy-Maszk (Trtnetei), Wass is mentioned in passing only (3: 703,
704, 713, 790). Apart from Vilmos gostons convincing and highly critical
monograph on him (2007), only a few scholarly articles (Gyimesi, Kunstr,
Ablonczy, Mrkus) have appeared on Wass in respectable literary journals,
and these tend to deal more with his controversial life than with his literary
works. Serious Hungarian literary critics and scholars belittle Wasss oeuvre as
boring, of low quality, and irritating. They find the writers enormous popularity an embarrassement. It rests, they believe, almost exclusively on political
foundations.
Indeed, Wass has become the darling, something of an emblem, of rightwing chauvinists and anti-Semites. Witness the testimony of Katalin Kondor,
who headed the Hungarian Radio in the years 20012005: one can learn a
tremendous amount from him, about nature, about man, about history, about
570
decency, about loyalty, about love for your country, and it was due to his influence that I came to see clearly a good many historical facts and events that
were until now kept in deliberate obscurity (Turcsny, emlkezetre 643). The
panegyric of poet Pter Turcsny, Wasss chief apostle, tops this considerably:
Since Shakespeare, no writer has created, no human being has thought over,
so many dramatic situations [] He is more Orphic than any Homer [] He
is the Prince, but he could not assume his throne while he lived. He is the
writer chieftain of the Magyars, but it is only after his death that we have come
to hear his call to take possession of our country (Turcsny emlkezetre 642).
For Turcsny and his likeminded admirers, Wasss standard title has become
rfejedelem (writer chieftain or Prince of the Writers).
Wasss admirers claim, in all seriousness, that he won a gold medal at the
1936 Olympics, but was deprived of it because the Romanians claimed he was
not a Hungarian citizen (documents shows that he was not member of the
Hungarian team); another story holds that he was seriously considered for the
Nobel Prize in literature but was finally dropped because of dilly-dallying at
the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. A number of events in Wasss biography
remain highly doubtful, either because they are not documented, or, more frequently, because of deliberate self-stylization, obfuscation, and mystifications
by Wass and his admirers. To these belong his alleged opposition to the Nazis,
founding membership in the Transylvanian Szpmives Ch in 1924 (at age
16?), membership in the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (he is not listed in
Becks official list of members since its foundation), various Securitate murder
attacks on him, strenuous attempts to exonerate him of suicide, and misleading claims concerning his non-existent US and international reputation. Such
gems in the treasure house of Wassiana are ironically questioned by Bla
Mrkus (Hozsanna), who often relies on the Hungarian-American historian Bla Vrdy, and, somewhat less rigorously, by Blint Ablonczy.
Against all such imaginary and vastly exaggerated claims there is an incontrovertible fact, whose background should but probably never will be clarified: the death sentence in absentia pronounced on Albert and his father by a
Romanian court on March 13, 1946. A Hungarian translation of the verdict is
printed in Turcsnys Wass Albert lete (5256), together with a 1979 testimony
by Wasss wife in 1940, va Wass (102103). At issue here is not only to what
extent Albert Wass was involved in the two murder cases committed by the
Hungarian troops in 1940, but also the Romanian courts composition, legitimacy, and manner of proceeding. We know that the conceptual trials that
swept the Soviet-ruled regimes after the war falsified evidence and cared little
about legality. That knowledge (and not Wasss proven innocence) was very
likely behind the decision of the US authorities in the 1970s to refuse the Ro-
571
manian governments request to extradite Wass. Doubts about the Romanian

trials is also behind the Romanian rehabilitation proceedings of Vintila Horia
(see the introductory essay of this volume) and of other Romanian writers
who sympathized with the Iron Guard or the fascist Antonescu regime. However, in Wasss case, the Romanian courts seem to have confidence in the original court and its decision, for they are willing to reopen the case only if new
evidence turns up. Hungarian requests to reconsider Wasss Romanian death
sentence have, therefore, been rejected by the Romanian courts. The recent
decision of the Highest Appeal Court, on May 2008, not to reconsider the
Wass case for lack of new evidence (www.demokrata.hu/napi-hir/elutasitottak-a-perujrafelvetelt-wass-albert-ugyeben) seems to put the matter at rest.
Meanwhile, innumerable articles appeared on the case in Hungarian dailies
and journals, but the overwhelming majority of these are unreliable rhetorical
arguments, whether pro or con.
There is a second incontrovertible fact in the Wass case, which has not
been sufficiently studied, his recently emerged enormous popularity. According to a 1998 survey, Wasss works are second most popular among
Transylvanian-Hungarian readers, after the novels of Mr Jkai but before
the bible (Mrkus, Hozsanna 114). In a more recent television voting,
Hungarian readers have included three of Wasss novels (A funtineli boszorkny, Adjtok vissza a hegyeimet!, and Kard s kasza) among the top hundred of
all times (see http://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Nagy_K%C3%B6nyv and
http://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magyar_reg%C3%A9nyek_list%C3%A1ja#
A_legn.C3.A9pszer.C5.B1bb_magyar_reg.C3.A9nyek). Hence, Blint Ablonczy rightly speaks in an interview with Mrkus of a Wass-korszak
(Iron/Wass Age) that starts with the startling survey. Indeed, lieux de mmoires
on Wass are sprouting all over Hungary, though not in Romanian Transylvania, where they are forbidden in public spaces.
What is behind this enormous and sudden popularity? Why have Hungarian literary critics and scholars not dealt with it until quite recently, and why do
they tend to shun it even today? Answers to these interlocking questions are
not easy. We offer a few tentative reflections, for they belong to the core issues
of this final section in our volume: the homecoming of exiles and their
work.
One clue to Wasss popularity may be found in the fact that readers rank
Mr Jkai, the romantic nineteenth-century raconteur, still higher. Simple,
readable style and smooth narrative typifies both. Jkais plots and characterizations are more original, and his spectrum of characters is both wider and
more balanced, but Wasss singular preoccupation with the woods, mountains, and rural people of Transylvania adds a dimension that is absent from
572
Jkais more urban settings. In Jkai, nature is dramatic rather than lyrical. In
narrative mode, Wass has simply missed the modernist turn to inwardness
and inner complexity, for his characters tend to be one-dimensional and unreflective. Many of Wasss readers seem to respond to his lengthy and mostly
lyrical nature descriptions that slow down the plot, and they seem to be
charmed by the religious and nationalist platitudes of his poetry.
These and similar aspects of Wasss writing make him popular, but displease most literary critics and intellectuals. Most of them dont read Wass, or
stop reading him after a few pages, declaring him to be dull, or irritating precisely because he is so popular. Most Hungarian critics self-assuredly claim to
know who is a good writer and who is not; though they have come to accept
that literary reputations take roller-coaster rides through the ages, they refuse
to recognize popular culture as a legitimate, even necessary, subject of literary
studies. I suggest that the key aesthetic question concerning Wass is not what
he wrote (and what aesthetic value this possesses), but why he is read. And
this question in contrast to the aesthetic one is simpler to answer by means
of sociological approaches. Did the survey ask why people ranked Wass so
high? Probably not. And if not, why dont critics take the issue further?
Whether we think of Wass as a minor or major writer, he is a major phenomenon on Hungarys literary, social, and political stage today.
This brings us to the heart of the matter, which is political rather than aesthetic (pace my colleagues in Hungary). Of course, there should be more
studies on Wasss works and cultural activities, and continued attention ought
to be given to his life and his ideology. These have been important subjects of
my present article too. But if I intended to set some matters straight, if I
wanted to separate myths from how it really happened, it was not just to
shed light on the historical Wass and his oeuvre, but for what he and his work
have come to mean after 1989 in Hungary for an obviously very large readership. In the absence of good studies on Wass-reading and -readers, I can only
guess, though with a strong hunch, that most of his attraction lies not in the
aesthetic qualities (or their absence) discussed above, but in the political appeal of his chauvinism and anti-Semitism. Most readers would probably deny
this, as Wass himself did. Yet the nature of his political attraction is evident
from the way in which he has been celebrated by the surprisingly large rightwing public in todays Hungary. Wass has become a political icon and something of a national novelist. And the literati, whose political views tend to be
to the left of Wass, now look with alarm at this social and political (rather than
aesthetic) phenomenon; many of them get intimidated by the violent tone of
the Wass adulators and prefer to remain silent. It may be asked whether this is
not a certain trahison des clerks, an evasion of responsibility that is frequently
573
couched in the commonplace that Wass is still too close to us, that time will
tell whether his fame and popularity will be permanent. But evading the present
political and aesthetic issues by saying we do not and cannot know yet
whether he will become a classic leads to silence. What literary scholars,
critics, historians, and sociologists should ask in all cases of East-Central
European homecomings which Wass exemplifies, even if in an extreme
form is what forces and currents in the present-day societies glorifies one
and rejects the other prodigal exiled writer.
Studies on Wass cannot limit themselves merely to the controversial data
of his life, or to the close reading of his fiction. Elements of these ought to
be woven into sociologically and psychologically oriented approaches to his
reception, as part of an analysis of Hungarys social and political life today.
The Wass case, unique as it is, exemplifies how the heritage of exile authors
continues to shape the present, not only in Hungary, but also in other EastCentral European countries. Dracula is not the only ghost that haunts the region.
Works Cited
Ablonczy, Blint. Mtoszgyr. Reakci (February 2008): 810. http://www.reakcio.hu/
content/kozelet_20080221_mitoszgyar?page_nr=1 (consulted on October 13, 2008).
Ablonczy, Blint. Wass-korszak (Iron Age) [interview with Bla Mrkus] Hetivlasz 5.21
(May 26, 2005). www.hetivalasz.hu/cikk/0505/11474
goston, Vilmos. A kisajttott tr irodalma. A nemzeti kpzelet Doru Munteanu s Wass Albert
mveiben (Literature of the Expropriated Space. The National Conception in the Works
of Doru Munteanu and Albert Wass). Budapest: EKIK, 2007.
Balzs, Ildik. Wass Albert letm-bibliogrfia, 19232003 (Bibliography of Albert Wasss
Oeuvre, 19232003). Pref. Mrs. Lszl Bajnok. Pomz: Krter, 2004.
Beck, Mihly et al, ed. A Magyar Tudomnyos Akadmia tagjai 18252003 (Members of the
Hungarian Academy of Sciences). 3 vols. Budapest: MTA Trsadalomkutat Kzpont
Tudomnytr, 2003.
Bobula, Ida. Origin of the Hungarian Nation. Astor, FL: Danubian P, 1982.
Borbndi, Gyula. A magyar emigrci letrajza (Biography of the Hungarian Emigration).
2 vols. Budapest: Eurpa, 1989.
Gyimesi, va Cs. Talpazat s diadalv. let s Irodalom (July 20, 2007).
Havas, Emil. Tiltakozom az Ellen, hogy engem antiszemitnak nevezzenek. Vletlen beszlgets Grf Vass [sic] Alberttal az rval (I Protest against Being Called an anti-Semite; An Accidental Conversation with Count Albert Wass, the Writer). Antibolseviki
Frum (November 1952): 5. [p. 13 in folder W1/c of the Vasvry-Collection, in the Somogyi Public Library of Szeged].
Jobbgy, Ilona, and Istvn Kutny. Hungarian folk dances, by Graphic Designs. Ill. Julius Hargittay. Astor Park, FL: Danubian P, 1969. Hungarian Heritage Books, vol. 1.
Kdr, Erzsbet: Csaba. Nyugat 33.11 (1940): 516.
574
Kereszthegyi, Jnos. Kiss Anna sirkeresztje avagy: Wass Albert antiszemita izgatsa
(The Cross on Little Annas Grave, or Albert Wasss anti-Semitic Agitation). Az Ember
(New York), May 3, 1952.
Kunstr, Csaba. Szimptia a sttsggel (Sympathy with Darkness). let s Irodalom 49
(2005) 5: 56 & 26: 10.
Magyar letrajzi Lexikon 10001990 (Hungarian Biographical Lexicon 10001990). 3rd, rev.
ed. gnes Kenyeres. 3 vols. Budapest: Akadmiai, 198182.
Mrkus, Bla. Hozsanna nked, Wass Albert? Kt dokumentumktet margjra (Hosanna to you Albert Wass? Marginalia for two Documentary Volumes). Kortrs 49.3
(2005): 11428.
Mrkus, Bla. Monogrfibl els (Top Grade for Monograph). Tiszatj 59.7 (2005):
9498.
Raffay, Ern, Mihly Takar, and Kroly Vekov, ed. A Grf emigrlt, az r otthon maradt. Wass
Albert igazsga (The Count Emigrated, the Writer stayed at Home. The Truth of Albert
Wass). Budapest: Szabad Tr, 2004.
Schpflin, Aladr. Erdlyi irodalom (Transylvanian Literature). Nyugat 28.7 (1935):15.
Szegedy-Maszk, Mihly, and Andrs Veres, ed. A magyar irodalom trtnetei (Histories of
Hungarian Literature). 3 vols. Budapest: Gondolat, 2007.
Turcsny, Pter, ed. Wass Albert lete; Tretlen hittel ember s magyar; a sajt tkrben (Albert
Wasss Life. Human Being and Hungarian with unbroken Faith. In the Mirror of the
Press). Pomz: Krter, 2004.
Turcsny, Pter, ed. Wass Albert emlkezetre. A k marad (To the Memory of Albert Wass.
The Stone Remains ). Pomz: Krter, 2004.
Vrdy, Bla. History of the Hungarian Nation 8301919 A.D. Based on the works and former
publications of D. G. Kosry, updated and re-evaluated by S. B. Vrdy. Astor Park, FL:
Danubian P, 1969. Hungarian Heritage Books, vol. 2.
Wass, Albert, ed. Selected Hungarian Folk Tales. Trans. Elizabeth M. Wass de Czege. Ed. Mrs.
Leonoir Boner. Illus. Bla Petry. Astor Park, FL: Danubian P, 1972. Hungarian Heritage
Books, vol. 4.
Wass, Albert, ed. Selected Hungarian Legends. Compiled from the collection of Freda B. Kovcs, by Albert Wass. Trans. Elizabeth M. Wass de Czege. Ed. Mrs. Leonoir Boner. Ill. Joseph Mr. Astor Park, FL: Danubian P, 1971. Hungarian Heritage Books, vol. 3.
Wass, Albert. A funtineli boszorkny (The Funtineli Witch). 3 vols. 1959. Pomz: Krter,
2003.
Wass, Albert. A kastly rnykban (In the Shadow of the Castle). 1943. Marosvsrhely:
Mentor, 1998.
Wass, Albert. A titokzatos zbak (The Mysterious Roe-Buck). 1941. Pomz: Krter, 2001.
Wass, Albert. Adjtok vissza a hegyeimet! (Return me My Mountains!). 1949. Jnnek! Adjtok
vissza a hegyeimet. Pomz: Krter, 2002. 61235.
Wass, Albert. Csaba. 1940. Pomz: Krter, 2003.
Wass, Albert. Egyedl a vilg ellen (Alone against the World). 1943. Wass Vrben s Viharban.
2002: 10963.
Wass, Albert. Egy el nem mondott beszd, s ami mgtte van. Katolikus Magyarok Vasrnapja (December 2027, 1992). Turcsny, lete 12123.
Wass, Albert. Elvsz a nyom (The Trace Disappears). 1952. Pomz: Krter, 2003.
Wass, Albert. Ember az orszgt szln (Man at the Roadside). Munich: Kossuth, 1950. Toronto: Vrsvry, 1993. Pomz: Krter, 2003.
Wass, Albert. Farkasverem (Wolf Pit). 1935. Pomz: Krter, 2002.
575
Wass, Albert. How I became an anti-Semite. 1993. http://www.halas.net/modules.php?

name=News&file=article&sid=4341
Wass, Albert. Jnnek! (They Come!). 1942. Jnnek! Adjtok vissza a hegyeimet. Pomz: Krter,
2002. 660.
Wass, Albert. Jzan Magyar szemmel. Kzleti rsok (With a Sober Hungarian Eye. Writings on
Public Life). 2 vols. Pomz: Krter, 2002.
Wass, Albert. Kicsi Anna srkeresztje (The Cross on Little Annas Grave). 1949. Valaki
tvedett (Somebody Made a Mistake). Pomz: Krter, 2003. 2531.
Wass, Albert. Mire a fk megnnek (By the Time the Trees Grow up). 1940. Pomz: Krter,
2002.
Wass, Albert. Tavaszi szl (Spring Wind). Tavaszi szl s ms sznmvek (Spring Wind and other
Plays. Pomz: Krter, 2004. 179.
Wass, Albert. The Red Star Wanes. Toronto: Literary Guild, 1965.
Wass, Albert. Tizenhrom almafa (Thirteen Apple Trees). 1951. Pomz: Krter, 2002.
Wass, Albert. Vrben s viharban (In Blood and Storm). 1942. Pomz: Krter, 2002. Vrben s
viharban 5108.
Wilder, Thornton. The Bridge of San Luis Rey. 1928. New York: Harper Collins, 2004.
Zathureczky, Gyula. Transylvania; Citadel of the West. Problems behind the Iron Curtain
series, no. 1. Trans. & ed. A. Wass de Czege. Gainsville, FL: A.H.L.G. [American Hungarian Literary Guild] Research Center, 1965.
576
Chapter VI
Instead of Conclusion (Borbla Zsuzsanna Trk)
579
Instead of Conclusion:
East Central Literary Exile and its Representation
Borbla Zsuzsanna Trk
This essay attempts to highlight the main interpretative frameworks of our

volume. I thank with gratitude to Darko Suvin and Marcel Cornis-Pope,
whose talks at the Collegium Budapest contributed greatly to the development of my own standpoint. Yet I am most indebted to the inspiring comments and rigorous criticism of John Neubauer, without whom the project
would not have been possible.
Arrows into the Playfield

Exile is a socially and historically conditioned term, similar to other notions
describing political entities as nation, nationalism, public sphere, or civil society. Originating from the legal-political practices of antiquity, it refers to the
forced departure from ones home country, mostly for political reasons. Although the word had lost its semantic sharpness by the twentieth-century as
we saw it in the introduction to the present volume it did not disappear from
use, but has been kept, above all to refer to intellectuals, especially individual
opponents of oppressive regimes. Despite the emergence of a new terminology in the social sciences to designate transnational migration and displacement, the field of literature has been one of the areas where exile is still used
today. The complexity of its phenomenology, which challenges simplistic formulations, might be a reason why so little has been done for its more coherent
understanding in a regional and comparative perspective. Nevertheless, after
the fall of the Iron Curtain, the countries of the former Eastern Bloc have
been engaged in revising their literary canons, and here the exilic oeuvres
had to be reinterpreted. Further West and North, the influx of immigrants
especially during the Yugoslav wars also created academic interest in the
theme of exile and forced migration. Nowadays all parts of the continent are
affected by the major trends of globalization, whose effect is, among others,
the loosening of the previously dominant national perspectives and the search
580
Chapter VI
for trans-national phenomena. Thus exile has become methodologically

interesting too.
Surprisingly little is known about the international circulation of twentiethcentury East-Central European intellectuals. Except for important but isolated case studies on academic migration, mostly carried out in Western countries, mostly France and the United States (see for instance Christoph Charle
or Laura Fermi), the phenomenon has remained on the periphery of scholarly
attention. Sociologists focused on all too large-scale mass phenomena to accommodate such specific and complex cases as the transplantation of the
sciences, the humanities, art, or literature. On the other hand, literary histories
in the former Eastern Bloc provide no overviews of the theme. The overwhelming majority of existing scholarship produced in the homelands of exile
focuses on individual cases, contextualizing them within their home or host
milieu.
The complexity of the term has been common knowledge: the meaning of
exile, and of home, varies not least as a function of age and generation, of biography and history, of self and circumstance (Rubn D. & Rubn G. Rumbaut 331). This has prompted some literary scholars to draw time-resistant
definitions, arriving at untenable generalizations. Such conceptualizations
often emerged in a pre-set emotional-ideological field, and were accompanied
by a narrow range of case studies that support the particular approach chosen.
Despite repeated warnings that exile should not be described in moral-political terms, literary historians have found it difficult to detach themselves emotionally and ideologically from their object of study.
Obviously, fiction writers in exile are a difficult case, because they belong to
the species with the highest urge of self-narration, and the enforced distance from home invites techniques for seeing ones life as a story (Konrd 57). The myth-making memory of authors in exile is a commonplace, but
even ordinary people are tempted by the situational nostalgia of writing, as
literary historian Orm verland claims: the act of writing welcomes, but also
overemphasizes and distorts the importance of memory and nostalgia in the
daily life of immigrants (verland 9). But while the identification of literary
authors with their life stories should not be surprising, few critics have found
the tools to engage critically with the discursive self-fashioning. Beyond the
consensus that exile means ostracizing for, opposition to, or deviance from,
prevailing political institutions (whether these were right-wing interwar governments that pushed communist writers eastward, or postwar communist regimes that punished their opponents by ejecting them westward), we know
still too little about the circumstances of expulsion, or about the social, cultural, and institutional context of the host countries.
581
Until recently, exile also tended to be celebrated as a metaphor for heroic

modern alienation and psychic difference, which occasionally provoked the
contrary reaction among critical spirits, the latter trying to puncture the
myth of the suffering author-in-exile. Evoking the successful integration
into host countries of some famous East-European male exiles ranging
from the members of the Polish great emigration (Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Sovacki and Kamil Norwid) to the pre- and postwar generation of Czesaw Mios, Josef Skvorecky and Milan Kundera Ewa Thomson maintains,
for example, that the actual literary success in the most creative and productive cities and cultures of the world stands in stark contrast with the postures
which the exiled writer may assume. According to her, literary scholars dealing with exiles from East-Central Europe should also consider the advantages of exile instead of reiterating ad nauseam the romantic topos of the
lonely writer bereft of homeland support and facing an indifferent foreign
audience. A major mistake among critics is, so Thompson, to identify with the
tragic imaginative projection of the exilic imagination, because the exiles
from the peripheries of Europe gained access to some of the most creative
and productive cities and cultures on earth, which is exactly the opposite
of the case of Ovid, banished from the metropolis to the barbaric fringes
(Thompson 500501). Thompson reminds us that the oeuvre of these Eastern European writers reached much greater depth, thanks to the intellectual
and artistic effervescence of their new surroundings in the west and in the
major US American cities they simply wrote their best works there, which
questions their stereotype of an alienated and powerless writer. Writers
of the twentieth century were enabled to speak to a global audience and make
an unprecedented impact. Thus for the first time in the history of the region,
writers exiled from Eastern Europe have begun to forge a definition of that
part of the world that has become comprehensible to the home audience and
to the audiences of the host countries. They have helped to create an understanding of the unity of the other Europe which had not existed in the West
before, and they have begun to position the other Europe vis--vis its Western audience (505). Thompson emphasizes the intellectual and emotional
skills of the successful twentieth-century authors, who, in contrast to their
earlier predecessors, were much better integrated into the host environment,
and tried to be understood by both old and new audiences (506).
Successful integration may exist side by side with cases of tragic psychological alienation that have been a common fact in the biographies of even famous exiles, for instance the Romanian-born surrealist, Ghrasim Luca, Paul
Celan from Czernowitz, or the Hungarian exile Sndor Mrai. Thompsons
careful selection of the handful happily integrated exiles supports the vali-
582
Chapter VI
dity of her argument, although the more one investigates the social psychological aspects, the more obvious the psychological damage of uprooting
shows itself in the mechanisms of coping with the new environment (Tabori 2930). Yet Thompson rightly draws attention to the necessity to consider exile in a larger perspective, in which analyses of texts must be inserted
into the social context.
Scholars grappling with the semantic complexity of the notion face the difficulty that it incorporates both timeless and historically bound components
of meaning. Forced departure for political reasons, but continued ties to the
home culture in spite of physical absence these are salient aspects that feature also in the biographies of our case studies. Exile is unimaginable without
political differences. The ousting regime, the exiled person, and the media,
recognize, and in a sense create, the figure of exile as a political opponent.
Darko Suvin referred to this supra-individual aspect (incorporating the historically changing political, social and institutional-infrastructural context), as
the sociological feature of exile. Next to the macro-level there are individual
features each biography and its related literary oeuvre, is a unique case.
These psychological, intellectual, and moral aspects build up the axiological
level, according to Suvin, and can be grouped (and should be) into genres
and modalities etc., but they centrally deal with imaginary transpositions of
peoples mutual relationships, whose description therefore cannot exclude
the critics (and the original authors) subject-position, values, desires, fears
(Suvin 1).
The exiles attitudes change over time, as Paul Tabori reminds us: The
status of exile, both materially and psychologically, is a dynamic one it
changes from exile to emigrant or emigrant to exile. These changes can be the
results both of circumstances altering him in his homeland and of the assimilation process in his new country. An essential element in this process is the
attitude of the exile to the circumstances prevailing in his homeland which are
bound to influence him psychologically (37). This triadic interdependence is
best illustrated by Jerzy Jarzebskis contribution to our volume on the zig-zag
career of Witold Gombrowiczs fame. The slowly emerging international acknowledgement of Gombrowicz did not result from a successful career in the
European metropolises. Rather, the contrary was true: his inclusion in the international literary canon went hand in hand with the recognition that these
revered cultural centers were now becoming increasingly provincial.
The discursive aspects of exile seem to belong to its most salient features.
The status of an exile is permanently reinforced by the persons actual public
presence, which is particularly true for the revolutionary changes in the twentiethcentury media an aspect studied mainly in the social sciences, less in lit-
583
erary scholarship. Since the emergence of radio broadcasts see the chapter
by Camelia Craciun on Monika Lovinescu, head of the Romanian unit of
Radio Free Europe physical absence has been counterbalanced, in part, by
media presence. In view of such improvements in communication, one may
ask how the new technologies have affected the meaning and forms of twentieth-century exile. Looking at Romanian postwar exile groups of various
political backgrounds, social historian Mihai Dinu Gheorghiu noted the rapprochement of political languages, relevant topics, and rhetoric, arriving at
the conclusion that radio broadcasts significantly reshaped the political landscape of exiles, leading to a consolidation of voices in more uniform oppositions against the communist regimes (Behring, Rumnische Exilliteratur 5560).
His study invites further questions on the revolutionary role of internet communication in the 1990s, which not only has an unprecedented potential to
create new audiences, but compensates in new ways the corporeal absence of
exiles. The emergence of internet in the late 1990s contributed to entirely new
opportunities of contact between people abroad and at home. As Dragan
Klaics essay on the Post-Yugoslav theater exile illustrates in the present volume, the new exiles could easily access audiences at home via the World Wide
Web. We live in an age of information flow and increased international mobility, and intellectual nomadism has become the norm. Yet, as Klaic also reminds us, locally rooted artifacts may become extremely vulnerable if they do
not fit the larger trends in the globalization of the arts and literature, and are
not safely protected by sponsors and supporters.
The circulation of people and books resumed after the changeovers in
1989. It also brought home the oeuvres of many migr authors, accompanied occasionally by heavily politicized debates. Their reintegration has been
taking place parallel with the renegotiation of the home literary canons (as
illustrated by the article on Albert Wass by John Neubauer and on the integration of migr literature in the Hungary of the 90s by Sndor Hites in this
volume), which have become simultaneously more fragmented and more integrative as to genres, languages, and political attitudes. However, while the
social sciences have explored exile (and related notions) in broad comparative
geographical perspectives, there have been so far few similar attempts in the
literary field. It may be symptomatic that the Grundbegriffe und Autoren ostmitteleuropischer Exilliteraturen 19451989 (Basic Concepts and Authors of the
East-Central European Exile Literatures, 19451989) is the only publication
comparable to ours in scope.
584
Chapter VI
Transnational Perspectives
East-Central European exile had received some attention in postwar Western
academia, especially among US American scholars of immigrant background.
But it was in the 1990s that studies on collective identity, inspired first by Edward Saids perspective on the willed homelessness of the post-colonial immigrant intellectuals, then by the War refugees from ex-Yugoslavia, brought
the topic to the fore. Susan Suleiman evokes these aspects in Exile and Creativity: Signposts, Travelers, Outsiders, Backward Glances, a collection of essays on
famous European exiles, several among them from East Central Europe and
further East (Victor Shklovsky, Joseph Brodsky, Gyrgy Lukcs, Mikhail
Bakhtin, and others). Following Angelica Bammer, Suleiman suggests that
exile appears not only as a major historical phenomenon of our century, but
also as a subject of reflections about individual and cultural identity notions
that are intimately bound up with problems of nationalism, racism and war (2).
We could add, with problems of forced migration, refugees, and displaced
persons as well.
All this is also closely bound to such psycho-social manifestations as modern restlessness and uprootedness, and to the symbolic or de facto identification with the Jewish Diaspora. Indeed, the interior experience of exile
proved to be the special focus of interest for literary scholars, and a salient
question has been whether departure enhances creativity or dampens it (see
Suleiman). The question is difficult to answer and deserves a second look. Indeed, literary authors language is not merely a means of expression, but is anchored to deeper epistemological, and historical reflection, and to psychological and moral layers of identification and creation. Eva Hoffmans
autobiographical essay-novel Lost in Translation: a Life in a New Language eloquently illustrates how departure from post-Holocaust Poland to Canada and
the United States affected the cognitive layers of adaptation to the new environment, leading to the utter transformation of her personality.
Suleimans approach to the study of exile is in line with recent interest in
transnational, international, and global phenomena, accompanied by a critical
attitude towards national perspectives in the humanities. Pascale Casanova,
for instance, made a case for a history of a global literary space, a process by
which literary freedom is invented slowly, painfully, and with great difficulty,
through endless struggles and rivalries, and against all the extrinsic limitations political, national, linguistic, commercial, and diplomatic that are
imposed on it (350). She outlines a new history of literature that takes account of the internationalization of literary production that had emerged and
acted simultaneously with its nationalization. Such a history would uncover
585
the transnational aspects of literary space (a term inspired by Bourdieus notion of the field), and shift the vantage point towards the global republic of
letters, in which literary authors from peripheries compete for recognition in
the metropolises. Casanova is deeply concerned with the literary agency of
these foreigners from the small nations of Europe, and she attributes
them the capacity to challenge the dominance of the world cities, alter the balance of literary power, and ultimately rearrange existing hierarchies in the literary world. In this work, which focuses on immigrants in the major European
capitals (such as Paris at the turn of the twentieth-century), famous exiles from
Eastern Europe, like Cioran, Kundera, and Danilo Kis figure prominently.
Marcel Cornis-Pope goes even further in emphasizing the importance of
diasporic and exile literature. According to him, the latter played a central role
in East-Central Europe throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
He considers the role of emerging national centers from the perspective of
modernization theories, where the new regional clusters are formed in dialog
and emulation with the major cultural metropolises of Europe. Exiles are seen
as internationally mobile intellectuals who mediate between the host and
home environments.
Cornis-Pope argues that the expansive movements of creativity through
exile, transplantation, and participation in transnational projects have played a
defining role in East-Central European literature and art. The literary cultures of East-Central Europe have needed their Diasporic expansions to continually reaffirm themselves, retracing their boundaries and reimagining their
identity (Cornis-Pope 6). Even if one disagrees with such a dichotomous distinction between an allegedly progressive westernized diaspora and backwards nationalists at home (Cornis-Popes focus on the post-1948 generation
and the classical Romanian avant-garde reinforces this view), Cornis-Pope
rightly claims that the interplay between national and Diasporic, local and
global paradigms, calls into question any organic or totalizing concept of
East-Central European literary and cultural evolution. The contours of this
cultural region remain variable; always open to revision, to alternative mappings (9). Such interplays may occur many decades after the writing of the
crucial works, and are affected by political conjunctures. This process is difficult and by no means straightforward, as John Neubauers study in our volume on the post-89 Hungarian reception of the right-wing populist Albert
Wass illustrates. This case study also draws attention to the obvious although
most overlooked fact that exile does not necessarily means cosmopolitan
openness and artistic experimentation.
The History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Conjunctures and Disjunctures in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century is a recent outstanding work en-
586
Chapter VI
gaged with the analysis of literary fiction as a transnational phenomenon. A

concerted undertaking of several dozen authors from Europe and the US, the
History regards the writing and use of fiction in the social space and political
context. The choice of an East-Central European geographical framework
represents an alternative to the older national historiographies, for it problematizes the national heritage in a larger continental (or narrower, micro-social) perspective. The History asks for literatures use in various social locales
and realms, from the urban spaces through the micro-regions until the larger
regional units. Although it deals with exile only tangentially (by looking for instance at the significance of the cultural metropolises as Paris for the regions
literary creation), the methodology and the broad chronological and geo-cultural scope provide an ideal background for the study of literary exile itself.
In search of such broad and historically reflective accounts, one reads with
great interest the Grundbegriffe. This synthetic approach, the result of a threeyear collective project at the Geistewissenschaftliches Zentrum fr die Geschichte und Kultur Osteuropas (Center of Humanities for the Study of the
History and Culture of Eastern Europe) in Leipzig, is the first regional approach to post-war East-Central European literary exile. As I will show below,
the handbook integrates textual and institutional analysis, and approaches
exile as a transnational phenomenon across the politically separated Western
and Eastern halves of Europe. That it was a German research institute that
initiated the first significant account of East-Central European issues is
hardly accidental; the precedent had been set by the previous systematic survey of the German-speaking exiles fleeing Hitlers regime. After the upheavals
of World War II, the topic figured prominently on the agenda of West German literary historians, and academic interest in exile intensified in the decade
of the 1980s. For instance, a recently published handbook on German emigration in 19331945 (Krohn et al) focuses not only on literature, but also on
the sciences and the political field. Obviously, such a work does not have to
struggle with the formidable diversity of linguistic and cultural contexts as
our volume does, nor does it scrutinize such a long period.
Times and Themes of Literary Exile

The language and outlook of the studies on literary exile have been particularly strongly bound to their historical context. Such surveys usually edited
volumes range from documentary investigation of the circumstances that
led to exile (mostly from the Nazis) to Saidian approaches to estrangement
and marginality of exile. There are also attempts to consider exile in a more
587
optimistic fashion as the postmodern embodiment of our days traveler and

modern nomad.
The Dispossessed: an Anatomy of Exile a volume edited by Peter I. Rose,
whose title harks back at Paul Taboris monograph merely touches on EastCentral Europe, but it provides a survey of major themes, ranging from the
problems of integration to the host environment through the sites and infrastructure that absorbed them. The volume deals with World War II European
refugees, with the vulnerable minorities, and the authors identify with the
plight of the refugees by focusing on the loss and suffering caused by displacement (Rose 3). Obviously, the book does not deal with the former persecutors fleeing Communist retribution; it discusses only the fate of the victims
of fascist and Nazi regimes, mostly Holocaust survivors.
Writing on the successor generation, of exiles leaving after World War II,
Domnica Radulescus volume, Realms of Exile: Nomadism, Diasporas, and Eastern European Voices, deals with East-Central and Eastern-European authors.
Similar to the works mentioned before, the volume regards exile as an aspect
of the moral and human loss caused by war and ethnic cleansing. Yet the focus
here is on questions of identity and integration into the Western (here: American) society or the lack of it, manifest in Radulescus semantic linkage of
exile to Diaspora and nomadism. The latter is understood both literally but
also figuratively, as self-marginalization in the Saidian (and Deleuzeian and
Guattarrian) fashion: The modern exile, who often is a self-styled gypsy
and the actual gypsies, both ultimate nomads and exiles, are defined equally by
a longing for rootedness and uprootedness (Radulescu 4). The book was
written for a generic Northern American student audience with didactic purposes, specifically, how to make them understand the aspects that are directly tied with exile, such as ethnic diversity, social oppression and prejudice,
racism and censorship, freedom and democracy (6). The case studies focus
on the (self-) management of exile cum immigrant identity in the host context, best illustrated by the example of Andrei Codrescu, exile Romanian
turned US reporter star. The purpose of the case study on him is to show how
the two separate cultural components of his self are bridged in his narratives,
defying chronological time and single cultural existence (9).
How much an optimistic or pessimistic evaluation of exile depends on the
perspective of the observer mind Thomsons equally contestable and selective approach may be illustrated by Ksenia Polouektovas subchapter on Codrescu in this volume. Poluektova arrives at the opposite conclusion. Her
reading of Codrescus travelogue to his native land, The Hole in the Flag, explores the schizophrenic feeling overcoming the former exile at his first visit
to the post-communist homeland. Not only is such an encounter an aching
588
Chapter VI
reminder of ones own losses, but there is a deeper sense of crisis when facing
the nationalism and anti-Semitism of his native surroundings. The contrast
between such opposing interpretations reminds us that the integration of exiles into home and host cultures may remain forever incomplete.
It is definitely easier to regard Eastern European immigrants from the
perspective of the host countries provided the integration is accomplished
successfully. This is visible also in Radulescus selection of the prominent
postwar writers and artists, including Milan Kundera and Czesaw Miosz,
Codrescu and Krzystof Kieslowski, who look at their national identity with
critical-ironical detachment. Indeed, the volume suggests that the chief impact of exile fiction from the Eastern European region was the relativizing interpretation of national identity (and the embracement of multiple ones) in
the postmodern era: the image of Eastern European countries constructed
in the West by exile writers and artists influence not only the western consciousness but also the very national identities and cultural constructs of the
countries of these exiles (10).
Such optimistic speculations on the multicultural transformation of social
identities have been contradicted by sociological studies on migrants and exiles
in todays Europe. After 1989, both the former communist countries and
members of the European Union have been struggling with mentalities and institutional practices designed for the nation-state and thus inapt for dealing with
the influx of newcomers. In Writing New Identities: Gender, Nation, and Immigration
in Contemporary Europe, the editors Sidonie Smith and Gisela Brinker-Gabler
focus on the tension between the Western societies with an increasing number
of immigrants, migrant workers and refugees, and the still largely conservative
and discriminating national and gender norms of the host countries: European
nations have not understood themselves as countries of immigration, immigrants are represented as foreigners (7). The main concern of the volume is in
the fate of the women, the most vulnerable actors in this process:
This survey is also meant to map out the ideological and material environment that affects the everyday lives of the millions of immigrants in Europe who are women. These
women are variously subjects within discourses of nationalism, rights, and citizenship,
discourses through which their otherness within comes to signify and to materialize the
allocation of rights, privileges, and resources in their new nation. For instance, their sexual, racial, ethnic, and class positioning conjoin in the assignment of a particular status.
They may be migrant or immigrant, foreign national, ethnic or racial minority, guest
worker, or resident alien. These assignments of identities have material and cultural effects. (17)
The gender perspective has emerged only recently in European scholarship

on exile. German research may serve again as an instructive comparative
589
background; the Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Emigration 19331945 discusses

the participation of women in the migr elite. According to the Handbuch,
scholarly bias in favor of men has been proportional with the prominence of
exiles (tending to ignore or downgrade equal achievements of women), while
research is more balanced when it comes to the more numerous lower social
categories (Hntzschel 101). Similar is the conclusion of Orm verland, who
maintains that until recently, the immigrant of immigration history has been
male (11). Preliminary findings suggest that in the literary exile from EastCentral- and South-Eastern Europe women first became visible in the 1970s,
and gained prominence in the 90s.
As suggested earlier in our volume, the gendered nature of literary exile
from East-Central Europe is both a sociological fact and a matter of perception. The field is just emerging within a terrain nearly exclusively dominated
by paternalist discourses (see also Kliems). Yet the picture is rapidly changing thanks to the westernization of the home literary canons after 1989, and
the ensuing emergence of feminist perspectives in research and attention in
the oeuvre of women authors. One discovers independent female intellectuals from the region, who were no longer just spouses or mothers of famous men such as Agota Kristof leaving Hungary in 1956 or Libuse Monkov leaving Czechoslovakia in 1968. Recent monographs about the latter
two authors, published in the 2000s, investigate the narrative formulation of
gendered identity in the condition of war and forced displacement form a
quasi-totalitarian home context (Kliems, Petitpierre, and Riboni-Edme). Best
known today is perhaps the writer-journalist-scholar Dubravka Ugresic,
who went into voluntary exile in 1993 after a violent media attack on her
and other women colleagues during the Croatian war of independence. The
main accusation against Ugresic and her peers was their refusal to identify
with the new nation-state, with her expected role as a woman patriot, and
with the war waged in Croatias name (Lukic, Witches). Indeed, what distinguishes Dubravka Ugresic is her ironic distance from all the prescribed roles,
should they come from the home media or the international literary award
committees:
Some ten years ago I had an elegant Yugoslav passport with a soft, flexible, dark red
cover. I was a Yugoslav writer. Then the war came and without asking me the Croats
thrust into my hand a blue Croatian passport (it had resolutely rejected red, the Communist color, but the hardness of its cover reminded one of the old Soviet pass for the
Lenin Library). The new Croatian authorities expected from their citizens a prompt
transformation of identity, as though the passport itself was a magic pill. Since in my case
it did not work well, they excluded me from their literary, and other, ranks. With my
Croatian passport I abandoned my newly acquired homeland and set off into the
world. Out there, with the gaiety of Eurovision Contest fans, I was immediately ident-
590
Chapter VI
ified as a Croatian writer. I became the literary representative of a milieu that did not
want me any more and which I did not want any more either. But still the label Croatian
writer remained with me, like a permanent tattoo. (Ugresic, European Literature 330)
According to the editors of the volume Writing New Identities, sensitivity towards the fate of unprivileged ordinary women shapes the literary writing of
todays female authors, arriving at new representations of gendered subjectivity, which may affect on the long run, the construction and deconstruction
of national identities in the New Europe (Smith and Brinker-Gabler 1517).
This is particularly relevant to the oeuvre of Ugresic. One thinks of In the Jaws
of Life and The Museum of Unconditional Surrender that reinvent the image of the
woman by uncovering the archeology of her local representations. Investigating the ways in which women intellectuals intervene in patriarchal and
nationalist inventions of woman, literary historian Svetlana Slapsak even
concludes that ex-Yugoslav war has offered feminists and women writers
new narratives, new politics of writing and publishing, and new patterns of
self-definition (24).
Studies occasionally touch on the theme of internal exile or, alternatively
on internal emigration. The German roots and political disrepute of the
term have been mentioned in chapter I; suffice it here a hint at the semantic
afterlife of the term in post-war literature both in Germany (Grimm 47) and
further east. Indeed, internal emigration has not managed to strip its political and semantic obscurity. Was it the German precedent that still echoed
in our region and turned inner emigration into a notion associated with a
politically questionable stance? In the Grundbegriffe, Alfrun Kliems notes the
prevailing inconsistency of its usage among literary scholars. The latter may
have played a role in the preference of the authors of Grundbegriffe for less
equivocal notions like home opposition and dissent, which by the sixties
and seventies grew either into political protest movements or/and into the
genres of samizdat, tamizdat, and underground culture. Such terminology
may prove correct from the birds eyes perspective, yet the micro-analysis
brings out the anomalies. According to this logic both the Hungarian-Jewish
Imre Kertsz and the Romanian Paul Goma would both be regarded as dissenters (only the latter is mentioned in the handbook, see Grundbegriffe 226),
without however being able to make further distinctions in regard with the
political stance of individual authors. After all, as John Neubauer sums up in
the introductory chapter, despite the conceptual fuzziness, the internal
migr/exile will be distinguished from the dissident by his or her abstinence
from active political involvement.
591
Grundbegriffe und Autoren ostmitteleuropischer

Exilliteraturen 19451989
The volume defines its topic as a countermovement (Gegenbewegung) that
was partly in opposition to the official cultural production in the communist regimes. What distinguishes this corpus from the German anti-fascist literature is its greater complexity and longer duration. As the editors contend,
postwar exile literature from the region had to absorb during its almost five
decades abroad the continuous arrival of newcomers, and integrate two or
even three generations, each of which arrived with different values regarding
the meaning of home literary heritage, cultural identity, and identification.
Different was also its reception and integration into the home canons, into
textbooks, literary histories and handbooks a process that was present, according to the editors, throughout these decades, in marked difference to
German history (21). The approach of the authors of Grundbegriffe is admittedly pragmatic, and the main topics, each constituting the thematic core
of a chapter, emerge along the key themes of international immigrant literature (these include terminology, the target countries, the institutions of exile
literary production, cultural resistance at home and its infrastructure, adaptation into the new milieus, the problem of language shift, and questions
whether there is a poetics specific to exile, consisting of particular topics and
typical genres).
A central theme of the volume is the literary expression of identity patterns,
and the specificities of integration into host cultures held dominant over the
native one an argument familiar from Ewa Thompson (29495). The reactions and the corresponding literary expressions are manifold and complex, and, especially in the first postwar decades, replete with minority complexes and self-hatred. The authors search for region-specific characteristics,
and locate it in the pronounced awareness of the history of the homeland,
documented by the presence of shared themes in the literary identification.
Accordingly, exiles tended to turn to the national traditions of their home milieus, sometimes even to the larger regional Slavic or Romance heritage, and
to the legacy of regional political thought centering on the East-European
underdevelopment in comparison to the West. With the new wave after
1968, these patterns seem to have been gradually replaced by thoughts on
multi-culturalism and transnationalism, rather than a homogenous national
belonging, or even the embracing of global rather than narrower national
identity (11). Such a conclusion rhymes with theorizings about the literary
space in the fashion of Casanova, Thompson, or Cornis-Pope mentioned earlier, and is linked to a view that exiles advocate cosmopolitanism and democ-
592
Chapter VI
racy. Yet attention to the new popularity of right-wing and chauvinist exiles
makes one more cautious let me allude once more to the case study on Albert Wass in our volume.
The Grundbegriffe mentions the obsessive home-bound thinking of EastEuropean intellectuals as a fairly distinguishing feature of their works. Yet
such heightened political and historical sensitivity as a reaction to the exile
status is not restricted to East-European writers only but is a general characteristic of immigrant literatures. The oeuvres of Naipaul and Rushdie and
their numerous followers illustrate immigrant literatures heightened sensitivity (often at the expense of the host context) towards the homeland, its ontology, tradition, and the normative subjectivities based on them. Naipaul,
Rushdie, and other important postcolonial writers tend to assume sharply
critical positions against the homeland, and in this sense East-Central European literary exiles are no exceptions.
An important question posed on the very first pages of Grundbegriffe is
about the interaction between exile literature and the home canon, especially
relevant in the Polish and Romanian cases (in contrast to the less pronounced
Hungarian, Slovak, and Czech ones). Not only is the inquiry important for the
editors seeking defining parameters of the fiction in exile, but also for todays
scholars in search for the transnational aspects of the literary traditions in the
region. Particularly important is the legacy of the Polish and Romanian
1848-ers in exile that was later integrated into the national canons. It also represented a usable knowledge for the next centurys newcomers and their
writings abroad (2426). One needs to add though that the incorporation of
this tradition increasingly becomes problematic, as Jerzy Jarzebskis analysis
of the irreverent stance of Gombrowicz illustrates in our volume.
The Grundbegriffe does not deal with authors of ethnic and religious minority background, except for Jewish literary exile to which it dedicates a subchapter although even prior to 1989 there was considerable minority emigration further west or east. Discussing the identification pattern of the
East-Central European migr Jews both in the United States and in Israel,
the Grundbegriffe mentions the sense of discomfort of assimilated and non-observant Jewish authors who could not identify with the life in the new home.
(307308). Sociologists have long pointed out the paradoxes of identification
in the case of such complicated triadic relationships between the ethno-linguistic (or ethno-religious) minorities from the region, their nationalizing
countries as well as the external homeland (Brubaker, see also Kymlicka).
Being caught between two countries, the dilemmas of identifying ethnic
and religious minorities become comparable. It is not surprising thus that the
disappointments and the pangs of failed integration of a Marek Hasko in Is-
593
rael are not far in their cultural-psychological nature from those of a Herta
Mller analyzed in our volume by Thomas Cooper. Yet they are separated by
the tragic historical legacy of World War II. While the Banat-Swabian writer
has to come to terms with the family past of perpetrators, her Jewish counterparts were struggling with the paralyzing burden of the Holocaust (see also
Hoffman, After such Knowledge).
The handbook is thus an unprecedented effort to embed the individual
stories in a vast cultural panorama, mediating between the realm of psychology, poetics, sociology and politics. By processing an impressive number of
biographies, literary texts, periodicals, and secondary literature, the authors
attempt to establish inductively the main structural traits of exile from EastCentral Europe between 1945 and 1989. Because of the range, the material inevitably remains somewhat scattered, lacking a single narrative binding the
separate bits. The primary attempt remains to categorize and systematize a
large corpus of sources, and indeed, the book is a thematically organized
handbook, rather than an encompassing historical analysis. Reading through
the Grundbegriffe (747 pp.), one finds a certain interpretive deficit. The effort to
create a systematic survey often leads to descriptive and factual narratives
rather than raising problems. This is especially evident in the restrained treatment of politically sensitive topics, manifest already in the choice of time
frame. By limiting the period to 19451989, the analysis inevitably lumps together writers from a variety of political factions into one counter-Communist pool. To be sure, the Grundbegriffe does not give an undifferentiated treatment to all exiles, be they fascists, social democrats, communists, anarchists,
or conservatives. Yet its compartmentalized approach does not allow for
identifying the political motors of the various waves of departure, and the resulting problematic relationship to home cultures, and their impact on the
conflict-ridden integration into the home canons. One looks in vain for an explanation on the recent political recuperation of writers by populist nationalists the silence on the posthumous success of the aesthetically second-rate
Albert Wass is a case in point.
Too great an emphasis on political and sociological matters overshadows
the uniqueness of literary works. Indeed, literary exiles are the most individual
species; they tend to be at odds even with the other exiles. The specificity of
writers and literary texts does not fit seamlessly into the socio-historical models. However, some theorizing is necessary and inevitable in order to indicate
how vastly different forced displacements have become in the twentieth century, and how this brought about a plethora of new studies with new perspectives.
594
Chapter VI
Works Cited
Behring, Eva, ed. Rumnische Schriftsteller im Exil 19451989 (Romanian Writers in Exile
19451989). Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2002.
Behring, Eva, ed. Rumnische Exilliteratur 1945 1989 und ihre Integration heute: Beitrge des
deutsch-rumnischen Symposions der Sdosteueropa-Gesellschaft und der Fundatia Culturala Romna
in Freiburg, 26./27. Oktober 1998 (Romanian Literature in Exile and its Integration today:
Contributions of the German-Romanian Symposium of the South-Eastern European
Society and the Romanian Cultural Foundation in Freiburg, October 2627, 1998). Munich: Sdosteuropa-Gesellschaft, 1999.
Brandt, Juliane et al, ed. Grundbegriffe und Autoren ostmitteleuropischer Exilliteraturen
19451989. Ein Beitrag zur Systematisierung und Typologisierung (Basic Concepts and Authors of the East-Central European Exile Literatures, 19451989. A Contribution to their
Systematization and Typology). Stuttgart: Steiner, 2004.
Brinker-Gabler, Gisela and Sidonie Smith, eds. Writing New Identities: Gender, Nation, and Immigration in Contemporary Europe. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997.
Brubaker, Rogers. Nationalism Reframed. Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge U.P, 1996.
Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Trans. M. B. DeBevoise. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard UP, 2004.
Charle, Christophe. Les intellectuelles en Europe au XIX sicle: essai dhistorie compar (The Intellectuals in Europe in the Nineteenth Century. An Essay in Comparative History). Paris:
Seuil, 1996.
Cornis-Pope, Marcel, and John Neubauer, ed. History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central
Europe: Conjunctures and Disjunctures in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century. Amsterdam:
Benjamins. Vol. 1, 2004; vol, 2, 2006; vol. 3, 2007.
Cornis-Pope, Marcel. National Literatures and Exilic Revisions: Towards a Polycentric
Concept of ECE Literary Cultures. Unpublished paper, given at the Collegium Budapest, on June 25, 2007.
Dewhirst, Martin and Andrei Rogashevskii ed. East and Central European migr Literatures:
Past, Present and Future? In Memory of Dr Igor Hajek (19311995). Special issue of the Canadian-American Slavic Studies 33.24 (1999).
Fermi, Laura. Illustrious Emigrants. The Intellectual Migration from Europe, 19301941. 2nd ed.
Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1971.
Goldgar, Anne. Singing in a Strange Land: The Republic of Letters and the mentalit of
Exile. The Republic of Letters in the Age of Confessionalism. Ed Herbert Jaumann. Wiesbaden:
Harrasowitz, 2001. 105125.
Grimm, Reinhold. Innere Emigration als Lebensform (Inner Emigration as a Way of
Life). Exil und innere Emigration (Exile and Inner Emigration). Ed. Reinhold Grimm and
Jost Hermand. Frankfurt/M.: Athenum, 1972. 3173.
Hntzschel, Hiltrud. Geschlechtsspezifische Aspekte (Gender-Specific Aspects). Krohn
et al. 101117.
Hoffman, Eva. Lost in Translation: a Life in a New Language. New York: Dutton, 1989.
Hoffman, Eva. After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust. New York:
Public Affairs, 2004.
Kliems, Alfrum. Im Stummland. Zum Exilwerk von Libuse Monkov, Jir Grusa und Ota Filip (In
Mute-Land. On the Exile Work of Libuse Monkov, Jir Grusa and Ota Filip). Frankfurt/M.: Lang, 2002.
595
Konrd, Gyrgy. A szmuzetsrol (On Exile). http://www.szochalo.hu/hireink/article/

102045/ (accessed: 20090302).
Kramer, Lloyd S. Threshold of a New World: Intellectuals and the Exile Experience in Paris,
18301848. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988.
Krohn, Claus-Dieter, Patrick zur Mhlen, Gerhard Paul, and Lutz Winckler, ed. Handbuch
der deutschsprachigen Emigration 19331945 (Handbook of the German-Speaking Emigration, 19331945). Darmstadt: Primus, 1998.
Kymlicka, Will. Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1996.
Jasmina Lukic, Withches Fly High: The Sweeping Broom of Dubravka Ugresic. European
Journal of Womens Studies 7. 3(2000), Special issue Women in Transit: Between Tradition and
Transformation 375383.
Manolescu, Florin. Enciclopedia exilului literar romanesc. 19451989 (Encyclopaedia of Romanian Literary Exile, 19451989). Bucharest: Compania, 2003.
verland, Orm. Visions of Home: Exiles and Immigrants. The Dispossessed. An Anatomy of
Exile. Rose 726.
Petitpierre, Valrie. Dun exil lautre: les dtours de lcriture dans la trilogie romanesque dAgota Kristof (From one Exile into Another. Detours of criture in the Agota Kristof s Novel Trilogy). Carouge-Genve: Zo, 2000.
Radulescu, Domnica, ed. Realms of exile: Nomadism, Diasporas, and Eastern European Voices.
Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001.
Riboni-Edme, Marie-Nolle. La trilogie dAgota Kristof: crire la division (Agota Kristof s Trilogy: to Write the Division). Paris: LHarmattan, 2007.
Richter, Ludwig, and Heinrich Olschowsky, ed. Im Dissens zur Macht. Samizdat und Exilliteratur der Lnder Ostmittel- und Sdosteuropas (Dissent from Power. Samizdat and Exile Literature of the East-Central- and South-Eastern European Countries). Berlin: Akademie,
1995.
Rose, Peter I. ed. The Dispossessed: an Anatomy of Exile. Amherst, MA: U of Massachusetts P,
2005.
Rumbaut, Rubn D. and Rubn G. Rumbaut, Self and Circumstance: Journeys and Visions
of Exile. Rose 33135.
Said, Edward. Reflections on Exile. Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile. Ed. Marc Robinson. Boston: Faber and Faber, 1984. 13749.
Seidel, Michael. Exile and the Narrative Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1986.
Suleiman, Susan Rubin, ed. Exile and Creativity: Signposts, Travelers, Outsiders, Backward Glances.
Durham: Duke UP, 1998.
Suvin, Darko. A Typology and Terminology of Exile as Displacement. Unpublished
paper, given at the Collegium Budapest, on June 10, 2007.
Tabori, Paul. The Anatomy of Exile. A Semantic and Historical Study. London: Harrap, 1972.
Thompson, Ewa M. The Writer in Exile: The Good Years. Slavic and East European Journal
33.4 (Winter 1989): 499515.
von der Lhe, Irmela and Claus D. Krohn ed. Fremdes Heimatland. Remigration und literarisches Leben nach 1945 (Foreign Homeland. Remigration and Literary Life after 1945).
Gttingen: Wallstein, 2005.
Ugresic, Dubravka. In the Jaws of Life. Trans. Celia Hakesworth and Michael Henry Heim.
London: Virago Press, 1992.
Ugresic, Dubravka. The Museum of Unconditional Surrender. Trans. Celia Hakesworth, London:
Phoenix House, 1998.
596
Chapter VI
Ugresic, Dubravka. European Literature as a Eurovision Song Contest. Writing Europe:

What is European about the Literatures of Europe? Essays from 33 European Countries. Ed Ursula Keller and Ilma Rakusa. Budapest: CEU P, 2004, 32734.
A Timeline of Exile Movements, 19192000
597

Year
Individual
Where?
1919 Lajos Kassk

Arthur Koestler
Ferenc Gndr
Bla Balzs
Sndor Barta
Erzsbet jvri
Jnos Mcza
Jzsef Lengyel
Ervin Sink
Gyrgy Lukcs
Jzsef Rvai
Lajos Zilahy
Kariks, Frigyes
Mihly Krolyi
Andor Nmeth
Gyrgy Blni
Ignotus
Lajos Hatvany
Anna Lesznai
Alexander Korda
Lajos Br
Lszl Moholy-Nagy
Rbert Bernyi (artist)
Sndor Bortnyik (artist)
Bla Ills
Vienna
Vienna; Palestine (26); Germany (29) etc. England (38)
Vienna; New York (26)
Vienna; Berlin (26); Moscow (31)
Vienna; Moscow (25)
Vienna; Moscow (25)
Vienna; Moscow
Vienna; Germany (27), Soviet Union (30)
Vienna 1919; Paris; Moscow (35); Paris (37); Croatia
Vienna; Moscow (29); Berlin (31); Moscow (33)
Vienna; Czechosl. (37); Moscow (39)
Vienna (returned the same year)
Vienna; Moscow (23); France (28); Moscow (31)
Vienna, etc. London and Paris (24); Vence (49)
Vienna
Vienna; France (23); Netherlands (48)
Vienna
Vienna; Berlin; Paris
Vienna
Vienna; Berlin; London
Vienna; Berlin (24); London
Vienna; Berlin; US
Berlin
Vienna, Germany
Ukraine; Czechoslakia (expelled); Vienna; Moscow (23)
1920 Andor Gbor

Tibor Dry
Antal Hidas
Aladr Komjt
Bla Uitz (artist)
Lajos Barta
Vienna (expelled in 25); Berlin (25); Moscow (33)

Vienna; Paris (23); Perugia (26)
Czechoslovakia
Vienna (via Italy); Berlin (2333); Paris (33)
Vienna; France; (24); Moscow (26)
Vienna; Bratislava (33); London (39)
1921
1922 Lnyi Sarolta
Erno Czbel
Moscow
Moscow
1923 Benjamin Fondane

Claude Sernet
Paris
Paris
1924 Florian Czarnyszewicz
Argentina
1925 Bruno Jasienski

Sndor Bortnyik
Antal Hidas
Paris; Moscow (29)

Return from Germany to Hungary
Return from Czechoslovakia to Hungary
598
Year

Individual
Where?
1926 Lajos Kassk

Andor Nmeth
Tibor Dry
Rbert Bernyi
Antal Hidas
Return from Vienna to Hungary

Return from Perugia to Hungary
Return from Berlin to Hungary
Moscow
1927 Lajos Hatvany
Return from Paris to Hungary
1928
1929 Witold Wandurski
Kiev
1930 Anna Lesznai
1931 Sndor Gergely

Ryszard Stande
Moscow
Moscow
1932
1933 Ilarie Voronca
Paris
1934
1935 Gyula Hy
Soviet Union
1936 Gyrgy Tbori
London
1937 Emil Cioran

Pl Tbori
Paris
London
1938 Bertalan Hatvany

Lajos Hatvany
Ignotus
Pl Ignotus
Ferenc Fejto
Gyrgy Faludy
Andor Nmeth
Tibor Tardos
Eugne Ionesco
Paris
France; England (39)
New York
London
France
Paris; Morocco; US;
France
France
Paris
1939 Ferenc Molnr

Andor Nmeth
Anna Lesznai
Havas, Endre
Aleksander Wat
Tadeusz Peiper
Anatol Stern
Julian Stryjkowski
Adolf Rudnicki
Adam Wazyk
Wasilewska, Wanda
Wadisaw Broniewski
Switzerland; USA
France
New York
Paris; London
Lww etc.
Lww etc
Lww etc.
Lww; Soviet Union
Lww; Soviet Union
Lww; Soviet Union
Lww; Soviet Union
Lww etc. Moscow; with the Polish Army to Jerusalem (41)

Year
Individual
599
Where?
1939 Czuchnowski, Marian

Leo Lipski
elenski
Tadeusz Boy-Z
Andrzej Bobkowski
Stanisaw Vincenz
Zygmunt Haupt
Jzef obodowski
Adam Bahdaj
Tadeusz Fangrat
Lew Kaltenberg
Andrzej Stawar
K. Iakowiczwna
Antoni Sonimski
Kazimierz Wierzynski
Julian Tuwim
Jan Lechon
Mieczysaw Grydzewski
Pietrkiewicz, Jerzy
Jerzy Borejsza
Jerzy Putrament
Melchior Wankowicz
Witold Gombrowicz
Micha Choromanski
Konstanty A. Jelenski
Frantisek Langer
Pavel Tigrid
Vladimr Clementis
Jir Mucha
Egon Hostovsky
Viktor Fischl
Zdenek Nejedly
Gejza Vmos
Soviet labor camps (39); with the Polish Army to London (41)
Lww etc.; Beirut; Palestine/Israel (45)
Lww
Paris; Guatemala (48)
Hungary; Switzerland (45)
Hungary; England
Hungary; Spain
Hungary
Hungary
Hungary
Hungary
Hungary Kolozsvr/Cluj
Romania; France; London
Romania; France; Portugal; Brasil; Long Island (41)
Romania; France; Rio; New York (41)
Romania; France; Rio; New York (41)
Romania; France; London
Romania; France, Great Britain
Moscow
Moscow
Romania; Tel Aviv; Italy; US (49)
Buenos Aires; Berlin (63); France (64)
South America; Canada (41)
Paris
Paris; London
London
London
London
France; US (41)
London
Moscow
China; Brasil
1940 Theo Florin

Arthur Koestler
Jovan Ducic
Gus. Herling-Grudzinski
Rastko Petrovic
London (via Paris)

Marseille; London
Portugal; US
Lww; deported to Gulag camp; w. the Polish Army to Italy
(42)
US
1941 Gy. Plczi-Horvth

Milos Crnjanski
Horia Stamatu
Asia & Africa

London (from Rome via Lisbon)
Germany; interned at Buchenwald; Freiburg (48);
Madrid (51); Freiburg (61)
1942
1943 Milo Dor
Viktor Vida
Austria
Rome; Buenos Aires (48)
1944 Jzsef Rvai

Jerzy Putrament
Jerzy Borejsza
Albert Wass
Aron Cotrus
Pamfil Seicaru
Return from Moscow to Hungary

Return from Moscow to Poland
Return from Moscow to Poland
Germany; USA (51)
Stayed in Madrid after the war; California (57)
Madrid
600
Year

Individual
Where?
1945 Vintila Horia

Jzsef Nyro
Lajos Marschalk
Rudolf Dilong
Mikuls Sprinc
Milo Urban
Tido Jozef Gaspar
Karol Strmen
arnov
Andrej Z
Stanislav Meciar
Jn E. Bor
Jn Okl
Koloman K. Geraldini
Jn Dornsky
Jozef Cger-Hronsky
Wacaw Iwaniuk
Elie Wiesel
Virgil Gheorghiu
Isidore Isou
Frantisek Langer
Vladimr Clementis
Viktor Fischl
Pavel Tigrid
Adam Bahdaj
Tadeusz Fangrat
Lew Kaltenberg
Andrzej Stawar
K. Iakowiczwna
Zdenek Nejedly
Julian Stryjkowski
Adolf Rudnicki
Adam Wazyk
Bla Balzs
Bla Ills
Gyrgy Lukcs
Gyula Hy
Andor Gbor
Sndor Gergely
Lajos Barta
Italy; Buenos Aires (48); Madrid (53)

Madrid
Germany
Austria; Italy; Argentina (47); Pittsburgh, US (65)
Austria; Italy; US (46)
Returned by the US but allowed to leave for Croatia
Returned by the US to Czechoslovakia
Austria; Italy; Cleveland, US (49)
Returned by the US to Czechoslovakia
Italy; Buenos Aires
Italy; Argentina (48)
US (52)
Argentina
Canada
Austria; Italy; Argentina (48)
England; Toronto
France, US (55)
Germany, France (46)
Paris
Return from London to Czechoslovakia
Return from Hungary to Poland
Return from Moscow to Czechoslovakia
Return from the Soviet Union to Poland
Return from London to Hungary
1946 Sarolta Lnyi

Erno Czbel
Gyrgy Faludy
Wadysaw Broniewski
Julian Tuwim
Stanisaw Vincenz
Jerzy Giedroyc

Return from the US to Hungary
Return from Palestine to Poland
Return from the US to Poland
From Hungary to France; Switzerland
Rome; Paris (47)
1947 Gy. Plczi-Horvth

Lajos Hatvany
Andor Nmeth
Tibor Tardos
Jir Mucha
Egon Hostovsky
Lajos Zilahy
Return from London to Hungary

Return from Oxford to Hungary
Return from France to Hungary
Return from France to Hungary
Return from the US to Czechoslovakia
US

Year
Individual
601
Where?
1947 Jzsef Bakucz

Pter Halsz
Gyula Zathurecky
Traian Popescu
Virgil Ierunca
Monica Lovinescu
Alexandru Cioranescu
Isidore Isou
Miron Butariu
Czesaw Bednarczyk
New York
New York
Germany
Madrid (from a detention camp)
Paris
Paris
Paris, Tenerife
Paris
Austria; Paris; New York (51); Los Angeles (74)
England
1948 Ignotus
Roman Brandstaetter
Sndor Mrai
Miksa Fenyo
Lszl Cs. Szab
Paul Celan
Jan Drabek
Pavel Tigrid
Milada Souckov
Jan Cep
Ivan Blatny
Ivan Jelnek
Ferdinand Peroutka
Viktor Fischl
Wacaw Iwaniuk
Jerzy Sito
Return from New York to Hungary

Return from Israel to Poland
Posillipo; New York (52); Salerno (67); SanDiego (80)
Rome; Paris; New York (53); Vienna (70)
Italy; London (51)
Paris
Canada
Paris
Resigns from diplomatic service in New York
France; Munich (51); Paris (55)
London
England
London; New York (50)
Israel
Toronto
India; England
1949 Stefan Baciu

Zoltn Szab
Leopold Lahola
Ephraim Kishon
Imrich Kruzliak
Rio de Janeiro; Seattle (62); Honolulu (64)

Resigns from dipl. service in France; London (51);
Israel
Israel
Austria; Munich (51)
1950 Havas, Endre

Gyrgy Schpflin
Egon Hostovsky
Recalled from diplomatic serv. by the Hungarian governm.

Resigns as Hungarian Ambassador in Stockholm; London
US
1951 Czesaw Miosz

Antoni Sonimski
Gyrgy Blni
Paris; Berkeley (60)

Return from London to Poland
Return from the Netherlands to Hungary
arnov
1952 Andrej Z
Gherasim Luca
Austria; Italy
Israel; France
1953
1954
1955 Jzsef Lengyel
Return from the Soviet Union to Hungary
1956 Gyrgy Faludy

Pl Ignotus
Gyozo Hatr
Gy. Plczi-Horvth
gota Kristof
Gyrgy Ferdinandy
London; Toronto (67)

London
London
London
Switzerland
Paris; Puerto Rico (64)
602
Year

Individual
Where?
1957 Tibor Mray

Tams Aczl
Ida Fink
Jerzy Kosinski
Micha Choromanski
Paris
London, Amherst, MA (66)
Israel
US; U of Massachusetts Amherst
Return to Poland
1958 Marek Hasko
Paris etc.
1959 Antal Hidas

Jerzy Sito

Return from England to Poland
1960 Petru Dumitriu

Boris Maruna
Germany and France

Argentinia; US
1961 Andrzej Stawar

Tadeusz Chabrowski
Paris
US
1962 Melchior Wankowicz
Return from the US to Poland
1963 Sawomir Mrozek

Jirina Fuchsov
Tibor Tardos
Italy; Paris (68); US; Germany; Mexico (8797)

Los Angeles
Paris
1964
1965 Gyula Hy
Andrei Codrescu
Switzerland
Italy; US (66)
1966 Jan Kott

Leopold Tyrmand
US
France; US
1967 Ladislav Mnacko

Teodor Parnicki
Henrik Grynberg
Israel
Return from Mexico City to Poland
New York
1968 Zygmunt Bauman

Ladislav Mnacko
Jan Novk
Jaroslava Blazkov
Vera Linhartov
Arnost Lustig
Dusan Simko
Israel; England
Return to Czechoslovakia; new exit to Austria
Vienna, Canada
Canada
Paris
Israel; US (73)
Basel
1969 Josef Skvorecky

Zdena Salivarov
Ion Ioanid
Antonn Brousek
Ivan Divis
Anna Frajlich
Toronto via US
Canada
Germany
Germany
Munich
Rome; US (70)
1970 Leszek Kolakowski

Bla Uitz
Canada etc.; Oxford

1971 Nicolae Breban

Gheorghe Astalos
Libuse Monkov
Witold Wirpsza
Paris
Paris
Germany
Berlin
1972 Wodzimierz Odojewski

Ioan Petru Culianu
Germany
Italy; Netherlands; Chicago

Year
Individual
Where?
1973
1974 Ota Filip
Milo Urban
Munich
Return from Croatia to Slovakia
1975 Milan Kundera

Dumitru Tepeneag
Gabriela Melinescu
France
Paris
Sweden
1976 Virgil Tanase

Pter Halsz & Squat Th.
Paris
Paris; Rotterdam; New York (77)
1977 Petru Popescu

Paul Goma
Los Angeles
Paris
1978 Pavel Kohout
Deprived of his citizenship while in Vienna
1979
1980
1981 Ion Caraion
Nicolae Balota
Stanisaw Baranczak
Lausanne
Paris
Cambridge, MA
1982 Janusz Gowacki

Adam Zagajewski
Kazimierz Brandys
Jir Grusa
New York
Paris
Paris
Germany
1983 Ion Negoitescu
Germany
1984
1985 Nina Cassian
Dorin Tudoran
US
US
1986 Lucian Raicu

Norman Manea
Paris
New York
1987 Herta Mller

Richard Wagner
William Totok
Johann Lippet
Bujor Nedelcovici
Matei Visniec
Germany
Germany
Germany
Germany
Paris
Paris
1988
1989 Mircea Iorgulescu
Dinu Flamnd
Liviu Cangeopol
Paris
Paris
US
1990 Alexandru Sever

Dorin Tudoran
Pavel Tigrid
Ladislav Mnacko
Boris Maruna
Israel
Return from the US to Bucharest as US diplomat
Return from Paris to Prague
Return to Prague (instead of Bratislava)
Return from the US to Yugoslavia
603
604
Year

Individual
Where?
1991 Jir Mucha

Predrag Matvejevic
Dubravka Ugresic
Slobodan Blagojevic
Hamdija Demirovic
Aleksandar Hemon
Mirko Kovac
Return from Paris to Prague

(From Zagreb) Paris; Rome (94)
(From Zagreb) Berlin, US, Amsterdam
(From Belgrade) Amsterdam
(From Belgrade) The Hague
(From Sarajevo) US; Chicago
(From Belgrade) Rovinj; Istria; Croatia
1992 Ovid Crohmalniceanu

Franz Hodjak
Slavenka Drakulic
Bogdan Bogdanovic
Igor Stiks
Adam Zagajewski
Berlin
Germany
Sweden
(From Belgrade) Vienna
(From Sarajevo) Zagreb; Paris; Chicago
Return from Paris to Poland
alica
1993 Antonije Z
Amsterdam
1994 David Albahari
Calgari, Canada
1995 Semezdin Mehmedinovic
(From Sarajevo) US
1996 Sawomir Mrozek
Return from Mexico to Cracow
1997
1998
1999
2000 Czesaw Mios
Ovid Crohmalniceanu
Return from the US to Cracow (after years of shuttling)

Return from Berlin to Romania
List of Contributors
605
Wodzimierz Bolecki
is Professor at the Polish Academy of Sciences and Humanities. An expert
in literary criticism and history, he is interested primarily in modern and postmodern fiction. Wodzimierz Boleckis books (titles in English) include A
Poetic Model of Fiction in Poland 19181939 (1982, 1996); Pre-texts and Texts.
Studies in the Intertextuality of 20th-Century Polish Literature (1991,1998); Hunting
for Postmodernists (in Poland) (1999); Conversations with Gustaw Herling (1997,
2000), Dark Love. Essays On Gustaw Herling (2004), The Bird-Catcher from Vilnius. On Joseph Mackiewicz (1991; 2007); and A World Apart by Gustaw Herling
(1994,1997, 2007 rev. ed.). See www.Bolecki.eu
Thomas Cooper
following completion of a dual-doctorate in Comparative Literature and Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University, Thomas Cooper taught Central
European literature in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at
the University of North Carolina. He held research fellowships at the University of Vienna and the Etvs Lornd University in Budapest. He also held a
research fellowship at the Center for Comparative Literature and Society at
Columbia University, and served as its Assistant Director. Following a research year at the Collegium Budapest Institute for Advanced Studies in Hungary, Thomas Cooper is currently teaching as Associate Professor at the Kroly Eszterhzy University in Hungary.
Marcel Cornis-Pope
is Professor of English and Director of the Interdisciplinary Program in
Media, Art, and Text at Virginia Commonwealth University. His publications
include Anatomy of the White Whale: A Poetics of the American Symbolic Romance
(1982), Hermeneutic Desire and Critical Rewriting: Narrative Interpretation in the
Wake of Poststructuralism (1992), and Narrative Innovation and Cultural Rewriting in
the Cold War Era and After (2001). He has also published numerous articles on
contemporary fiction, narrative studies, and critical theory. His current project is co-editing with John Neubauer the four-volume History of the Literary
Cultures of East Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Cen-
606
tury. Vol. 1 (2004), vol. 2 (2006), and vol. 3 (2007) have so far been published.
The fourth volume is slated to appear in 2009. He recently received VCUs
Distinguished Faculty Award.
Camelia Craciun
studied literature and history at Brasov, Bucharest, Budapest, and Oxford.
She worked as Associate Lecturer of Literature at Transylvania University in
Brasov and as a cultural journalist for various Romanian publications. She is
currently finishing her Ph.D. thesis at the Central European University, Budapest on Jewish Romanian intellectual history in the interwar period. She
worked as researcher in several international projects and was Junior Fellow at
the Collegium Budapest (2007), the New Europe College in Bucharest (2008),
and the Center for Advanced Study in Sofia (2008). She has contributed to
Jeffrey Edelsteins and Gershon David Hunderts The YIVO Encyclopedia of
Jews in Eastern Europe (2009) and published several articles in collected volumes and refereed journals on Eastern European literary exile and Jewish Romanian literature. She teaches currently at the Faculty of Letters, University
of Bucharest.
va Forgcs
is art historian, critic, and curator. A former curator at the Hungarian Museum of Decorative Arts and Professor at the Lszl Moholy-Nagy University
in Budapest, she has published a number of essays and monographs on the
Hungarian avant-garde, Modernism in Central and Eastern Europe, and contemporary art in various edited volumes and journals. va Forgcs is Adjunct
Professor of Art History at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, teaches
at the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, and is Senior Curator of
the Nancy G. Brinker Collection. Her books include The Bauhaus Idea and Bauhaus Politics (1991, 1995), El Kazovsky (1996), Lszl Fehr (1998), and Between
Worlds: A Sourcebook of Central European Avant-Gardes (co-edited with T. O. Benson, 2002).
Sndor Hites
studied Hungarian literature and linguistics, and philosophy at the Etvs
Lrnd University, Budapest, and has been a Research Fellow at the Institute
for Literary Studies of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences since 2003. He
wrote his Ph.D. thesis on historiography and the nineteenth-century historical novel (2005), and has published the books (in Hungarian) The Well of
the Past. Studies on Historical Narratives (2004), as well as Others Were Still Faltering When He Started to Speak: Mikls Jsika and the Historical Novel (2007). His
607
study on the Hungarian migr writer and scholar Andr Kartson is currently in press.
Jerzy Jarzebski
has been in Cracow since 1949, where he is now Professor at the Faculty of
Polish Studies, Jagiellonian University, and Board Member of the Polish
PEN Club. His interests are focused on twentieth-century Polish literature,
on the oeuvres of Witold Gombrowicz, Bruno Schulz, and Stanisaw Lem,
on the migr writers, and the most recent Polish prose. Jerzy Jarzebski was
Visiting Professor at Harvard University (1997) and the Hebrew University
of Jerusalem (20002001). He published more than 500 articles and
14 books, among them Gra w Gombrowicza (1982); Powiesc jako autokreacja
(1984); W Polsce czyli wszedzie. Szkice o polskiej prozie wspczesnej, (1992); Apetyt
na Przemiane. Notatki o prozie wspczesnej (1997); Pozegnanie z emigracja. O powojennej prozie polskiej (1998); Podgladanie Gombrowicza (2001); Wszechswiat
Lema (2003); Prowincja Centrum. Przypisy do Schulza (2005); and Natura i teatr.
16 tekstw o Gombrowiczu (2007). His works have been translated into seventeen languages.
Katarzyna Jerzak
was born in Poland and has studied English Philology at the Adam Mickiewicz University (Poznan), as well as Comparative Literature at Brown University and Princeton University (Ph.D., 1995). Katarzyna Jerzak is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Georgia (USA).
Her publications include articles on Witold Gombrowicz, Giorgio de
Chirico, E.M. Cioran, Norman Manea, and Henryk Grynberg. Her book
manuscript, Modern Exilic Imagination, is currently under review, as is
her translation of Polish-Jewish Monologue, a collection of Henryk Grynbergs essays.
ron Kibdi Varga
was born in Szeged, Hungary. He lived more than fifty years in Amsterdam,
and is now residing in Freburg, Germany as Professor Emeritus of French
Literature and Interart studies at the Free University, Amsterdam. His publications include numerous books and articles on French classicism, rhetorical
theory, and modern art, as well as several volumes of poetry. He is member of
the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and of the
Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA)
608
Dragan Klaic
is himself part of the post-Yugoslav theater exile. Educated in Belgrade in
dramaturgy and at Yale University, where he earned his doctorate in theater
studies, he became Professor at the University of the Arts in Belgrade, a
founding Co-Editor of the European theater quarterly Euromaske and a critic
and dramaturg. He moved in 1991 from Belgrade to Amsterdam and became
the Director of the Theater Instituut Nederland. Presently, he is a Permanent
Fellow of the Felix Meritis Foundation in Amsterdam, and he teaches arts and
cultural policy at Leiden University, the Central European University in Budapest, the University of Bologna and elsewhere. He is author of several
books, most recently of Mobility of Imagination, a companion guide to international cultural cooperation (2007), of Europe as a Cultural Project (2005), and
of the exilic memoir Exercises in Exile (2004). His articles appeared in journals
and in more than fifty edited books.
John Neubauer
is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the University of Amsterdam and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy (FBA). He taught at
Princeton University, Case Western University, and the University of Pittsburgh, and he was also visiting professor at Harvard, Princeton and other universities.
Neubauers publications include Symbolismus und symbolische Logik (1978),
Novalis (1980), The Emancipation of Music from Language (1986), and The Fin-desicle Culture of Adolescence (1992), as well as substantial contributions to the
Mnchner (Hanser) edition of Goethes scientific works. He has edited with
Peter de Voogd The Reception of Laurence Sterne in Europe (2004), and is presently
editing with Marcel Cornis-Pope a four-volume History of the Literary Cultures
of East-Central Europe (three volumes to date).
Vladimr Papousek
is Professor of Literary History and Director of the Institute of Bohemian
Studies at the South Bohemia University, Cesk Budejovice. His main fields
of professional interest are twentieth-century Czech literature, existential
phenomena in literature, problems of exile literature, and the methodology
of literary history. His professional stays and research fellowships include
Columbia University (1994, 1996), New York University, and the University of
London (2000). He has published about hundred studies in Czech and foreign
journals and volumes, among them the recent Representation of Being and
Existence in an Epistemically Limited Fictional World (Style 2006). His book
publications include Troj samota ve velk zemi, on Czech Exile Literature in the
609
US (2001); Horizonty, on Z. Nemecek (2001); a study of Czech literature in

Chicago (2002); Existencialist (2004); and Gravitace avantgard (2007). With
D. Turecek he published a volume on literary history (2005), and with
A.Haman and J. Holy a volume on Western Criticism (2006).
Ksenia Polouektova
has studied comparative literature, Jewish studies, and history in Moscow, Budapest and Ann Arbor. Her doctoral dissertation (CEU) is on the history and
theory of travel and travel writing in Russia. Her study on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyns Russian-Jewish history, 200 Years Together, was published in 2008 at the
Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antsemitism. She is currently a Lady Davis post-doctoral fellow at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Guido Snel
is Assistant Professor of European Studies at the University of Amsterdam.
His Ph.D. was a study of the East-Central European fictionalized autobiography and the idea of Central Europe. He has written studies on European
literature and cultural history, he translated works by Milos Crnjanski and Miroslav Krleza, and he wrote three novels of his own. His interviews with and
essays by prominent European thinkers, artists, and writers about their European experience, Alter Ego. Twenty Confronting Views on the European Experience,
appeared with the Amsterdam UP in 2004.
Neil Stewart
is Assistant Professor at the Slavic Department of the University of Bonn,
Germany. His interests include Comparative Literature, Literary Theory, and
Media Studies. He has published monographs on the Russian postmodern
writer Venedikt Erofeev (1999) and on the reception of Laurence Sterne in
Russia (2005). He co-edited a volume on the representation of violence in
post-1968 literature and film (1968) and is currently writing a book on the
Czech fin-de-sicle journal Modern revue.
Susan Rubin Suleiman
is C. Douglas Dillon Professor of the Civilization of France and Professor of
Comparative Literature at Harvard University. Her most recent book is Crises
of Memory and the Second World War (2006). Her other books include Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre (1983); Subversive Intent:
Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (1990), Risking Who One Is: Encounters with
Contemporary Art and Literature (1994), and the memoir Budapest Diary: In Search
610
of the Motherbook (1996). She has edited several collective volumes, including
Exile and Creativity: Signposts, Travelers, Outsiders, Backward Glances (1998) and
Contemporary Jewish Writing in Hungary: An Anthology (co-edited with va Forgcs, 2003).
Galin Tihanov
is Professor of Comparative Literature and Intellectual History and Co-Director of the Research Institute for Cosmopolitan Cultures at the University
of Manchester. His publications include two books on Bulgarian literature
(1994 and 1998), a book on Bakhtin, Lukcs, and the ideas of their time (Oxford UP, 2000), co-edited volumes on Bakhtin and the Bakhtin Circle (2000
and 2004) and on Robert Musil (2007), a guest-edited special issue on Russian
avant-garde photography and visual culture (2000), as well as numerous articles on German, Russian, and East-European intellectual and cultural history, and cultural and literary theory. He is on the Editorial/Advisory Board
of Comparative Critical Studies, Slavonica, and Primerjalna knjizevnost and is Honorary President of the ICLA Committee on Literary Theory. He has held Research Fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt and the George Soros
foundations.
Borbla Zsuzsanna Trk
is a research fellow at the Zukunftkolleg, University of Konstanz. She finished her undergraduate studies in English and Hungarian philology at the
Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj, Romania, and earned her doctoral degree in
comparative history at the Central European University. Her research focuses on academic sociability, knowledge circulation, and the interrelation of
the social sciences and literary fiction in East-Central Europe. She co-edited
a volume with Victor Kardy on the Cultural Dimensions of Elite Formation in
Transylvania (17701950), and is currently preparing another one with Balzs
Trencsnyi and Dietmar Mller on comparative historiography in Europe,
titled Reframing the European Pasts: National Discourses and Regional
Comparisons (thematic issue of the journal East Central Europe, vol. 34, nr.
12 (2009).
Bogusaw Wrblewski
graduated in Polish studies at the Maria Curie-Skodowska University (Ph.D.
1986), where he currently is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Contemporary Polish Literature. He is founder and editor-in-chief of the literary
quarterly Akcent (1980). His publications include a collection of articles on
Polish prose Wydziedziczenie i komleksy (1986), the treatise Die Problematik Ost-
611
mitteleuropas in literarischen Zeitschriften in Polen (1996), as well as critical editions

of poems by Zbigniew Chako (1997) and Wacaw Oszajca (2003). He edited
the anthology Zauek poetw (2005), and a volume on Isaac B. Singer (Bigoraj,
czyli raj , 2005). He published about hundred articles in periodicals and
edited volumes in Poland, Germany, the US, Ukraine, and Hungary. He translated poetry from German and Russian (Wodzimierz Wysockis songs). Recently he has compiled and introduced a volume about Ryszard Kapuscinskis
writings, Zycie jest z przenikania (2008)
612
Index of East-Central European Names
613

Aczl, Gyrgy (19171991) 233
Aczl, Tams (19211994) 38, 88, 208,
210, 212, 228, 602
Acimovic, Dragan (19141986) 309, 311,
321,323
Ady, Endre (18771919) 23, 24, 49, 63
Albahari, David (b. 1948) 44, 313, 323,
497, 604
Alecsandri, Vasile (18211890) 22
Alexandrescu, Sorin (b. 1937) 360
Anders, Wadysaw (18921970) 29, 145,
147
Andrs, Sndor (b. 1934) 208, 210,
213,219, 220, 530, 535
Andric, Ivo (18921975) 310, 313, 313
Andrzejewski, Jerzy (19091983) 222
Antonesei, Liviu (b. 1953) 343, 365
Aranyossi, [Aranyossy, Aranyosi] Gyrgy
(b. 1944) 225
Arcade, L. M. [Mamaliga] (19212001)
287
Arghezi, Tudor (18801967) 287, 290
Arnthy, Kriszta (b. 1930) 307, 524, 533
Aspazia [Elza Rosenberga] (18651943)
24
Astalos, Gheorghe (b. 1933) 42, 602
Babits, Mihly (18831941) 24, 109, 112,
121
Baciu, Stefan (19181993) 37, 95, 601
Baconsky, Anatol (19251977) 285,
301
Badescu, Lucian (?-1979) 292
Bahdaj, Adam (19181985) 28, 599, 600
Bakal, Boris (b. 1959) 506
Bakucz, Jzsef (19291990) 88, 221, 529,
601
Balacioiu-Lovinescu, Ecaterina
(18871960) 279, 281
Balzs, Bla (18841949) 6, 23, 24, 26, 35,

4857, 60, 6272, 9798, 100101, 103,
110111, 11315, 119, 121, 124, 12629,
13132, 13637, 14043, 397, 399, 597,
600
Balota, Nicolae (b. 1925) 363, 603
Barnszky, Lszl (19301999) 530, 535
Baranczak, Stanisaw (b. 1946) 18, 42, 89,
162, 170, 172, 181, 603
Barbu, Eugen (19241993) 28788, 291,
301
Barka, Vasyl (19082003) 346
Barta, Lajos (18781964) 597, 600
Barta, Sndor (18971938) 53, 60, 6364,
66, 7172, 110, 11517, 11921, 129,
133, 597
Bartk, Bla (18811945) 30, 64, 227, 565
Bask-Mostwin, Stanisaw [Niedbal]
(b. 1917) 199
Bata, Thomas J. (19142008) 91, 265
Bauman, Zygmunt (b. 1925) 7, 41, 97, 369,
382, 602
Bednr, Petr (?-?) 264, 267, 272, 273
Bednarczyk, Czesaw (19121994) 82, 601
Bks, Gellrt (19151999) 231
Bldi, Mikls (19281983) 121, 122, 236,
528, 535
Bem, Jzef (17941850) 22, 47, 49, 204
Benes, Jan (19362007) 257, 270
Bernyi, Rbert (18871953) 597, 598
Berindei, Mihnea (b. 1948) 293, 295, 297,
298
Bernard, Nol (19251981) 83, 293, 301
Bernth, Aurl (18951982) 115
Bethlen, Gbor (15801629) 46
Biaasiewicz, Jzef (19121986) 195
Bib, Istvn (19111979) 38, 139, 209,
214, 218, 234
Bielecki, Czesaw (b. 1948) 163, 177, 179
614
Br, dm (?-?) 225

Br, Lajos (18801948) 51, 597
Blagojevic, Slobodan (b. 1951) 512, 604
Blandiana, Ana [Otilia Coman] (b. 1942) 5,
343, 364
Blatny, Ivan (19191990) 38, 601
Bobkowski, Andrzej (19131961) 74, 96,
98, 156, 168, 170, 171, 175, 18183, 398,
400401, 407409, 41113, 415, 492,
599
Bock, Ivo (b. 1944) 263
Bogdanovic, Bogdan (b. 1922) 604
Bogdanovic, Snezana (b. 1960) 510
Bogyai, Tams (19091994) 226
Blni, Gyrgy (18821959) 54, 63, 204,
597, 601
Bondy, Egon [Zbynek Fiser] (19302007)
257
Bn, Gyula (b. 1916) 239
atko-Bor]
Bor, Jn E. ([Ernest Z
(19071991) 94
Borbndi, Gyula (b. 1919) 46, 83, 84, 98,
205209, 212, 21416, 21820, 224, 228,
231, 236, 241, 52223. 531, 53536, 540,
566, 573
Borejsza, Jerzy (19051952) 28, 599
Bori, Imre (b. 1929) 238
Borsody, Istvn (19112000) 540
Borsos, Sndor (19201984) 205
Bortnyik, Sndor (18931976) 115, 597
Bossert, Rolf (19521986) 43, 485
Botez, Mihai (19271998) 294,
elenski, Tadeusz (18741941) 29,
Boy-Z
599
Brncusi, Constantin (18761957) 77
Brandenstein, Bla (19011989) 231
Brandstaetter, Roman (19061987) 36, 96,
601
Brandys, Kazimierz (19162000) 42, 170,
223, 398, 400407, 409411, 413415,
492, 603
Bratianu, Ion C. (18211891) 22
Bratianu, Maria (?-?) 290
Braun, Kazimierz (b. 1936) 499
Breban, Nicolae (b. 1934) 602
Bregovic, Goran (b. 1950) 505
Breuer, Marcel (19021981) 110
Brod, Max (18841968) 96, 417
Broniewski, Wadysaw (18971962) 29,

59, 98, 598, 600
Brousek, Antonn (b. 1941) 40, 602
Brzezinski, Zbigniew (b. 1928) 179, 181
Brzkowski, Jan (19031983) 82
Brzord, Vilm (19111995) 246
Brzozowski, Stanisaw (18781911) 169,
184
Bujdos, Alpr (b. 1935) 236
Burhan, Rahim (b. 1949) 501503
Busza, Andrzej (b. 1938) 82, 93, 170
Butariu, Miron (19051992) 38, 87, 601
Buzura, Augustin (b. 1938) 349, 361, 365
Calciu, Gheorghe (19252006) 296
Calinescu, Alexandru (b. 1945) 294, 343
Calinescu, George (18991965) 290, 301
Cangeopol, Liviu (b. 1954) 294, 343,
606
Caragiale, Ion Luca (18521912) 284
Caraion, Ion (19231986) 42, 68, 289, 301,
346, 603
Carnojevic, Arsenije III, (16331706) 10
Cassian, Nina (b. 1924) 42, 603
Cazaban, Theodor (b. 1921) 285
Ceausescu, Nicolae (19181989) 16, 42,
43, 83, 90, 97, 224, 225, 240, 276, 285,
288, 290, 291, 197, 198, 342, 344, 345,
346, 347, 360, 361, 363, 365, 432, 454,
476, 478, 483, 484, 485, 486, 487, 495,
499, 559, 566. 567
Celan, Paul (19201970) 16, 77, 78, 79, 98,
380, 433, 457, 464, 581, 601
Cep, Jan (19021974) 38, 83, 246, 256, 389,
601
Cerny, Vclav (19051987) 256
Chabrowski, Tadeusz (b. 1934) 602
Chako, Zbigniew (19211994) 192, 195,
196, 202
Chadzynska, Zofia (19122003) 332
Chciuk, Andrzej (19201978) 170
Chilecki, Andrzej (19351989) 173
Chmielowiec, Micha (19181974) 332
Chojecki, Mirosaw (b. 1949) 179
Chopin, Fryderyk (18101849) 22, 330
Choromanski, Micha (19041972) 94,
599, 602
Chvatk, Kvetoslav (b. 1930) 263, 264
Cger-Hronsky, Jozef (18961960) 32, 94,

95, 600
ivko (19351987) 501
Cingo, Z
Cioculescu, Serban (19021988) 291
Cioran, Emil M. (19111995) 12, 16, 17,
27, 31, 73, 79, 98, 224, 280, 292, 329,
340, 341, 406, 457, 459, 585, 598
Cioranescu, Alexandru (19111999) 37,
601
Cismarescu, Mihai (19161983) 293
Ciulei, Liviu (b. 1923) 499
Clementis, Vladimr (19021952) 27, 36,
81, 82, 599, 600
Codreanu, Corneliu Zelea (18991938) 30
Codrescu, Andrei (b. 1946) 12, 39, 90, 92,
98, 398, 43233, 437, 440, 449, 450,
45254, 456, 46668, 58788, 602
Conrad, Joseph [J. T. N. Korzeniowski]
(18571924) 23, 58, 81, 169, 389, 408,
410,
Constante, Lena (19092005) 363
Coposu, Corneliu (19141995) 363
Cornea, Doina (b. 1929) 284, 296, 343
Cosma, Mihail [Claude Sernet]
(19021968) 77
Costenco, Nicolae (19131993) 346
Cotrus, Aron (18911962) 32, 85, 599
Crnjanski, Milos (18931977) 9, 30, 81, 98,
30817, 319, 32124, 599
Cseres, Tibor (19151993) 216, 228
Csicsery-Rnay, Istvn (b. 1917) 231, 232
Csurka, Istvn (b. 1934) 216, 447
Cugler, Grigore (19031972) 300, 302
Culcer, Dan (b. 1941)
Culianu, Ioan Petru (19501991) 85, 90,
9799, 45758, 462, 602
Curtiz, Michael [Mihly Kertsz]
(18881962) 51,
Cusa, Ioan (19251981) 85
Cvjetkovic, Aleksandar (b. 1958) 516
Cyrankiewicz, Jzef (19111989) 330
Czajkowski, Micha (18041886) 47,
Czany, Adorjn (b. 1919) 95
Czapska, Maria (18941981) 149,
Czapski, Jzef (18961993) 14549,
15859. 168, 170
Czarnyszewicz, Florian (18951964) 94,
99, 597
615
Czartorisky, Adam Jerzy (17701861)

2122, 47
Czaykowski, Bogdan (b. 1932) 82, 93, 170
Czerniawski, Adam (b. 19342007) 82, 170
Czigny, Lrnt (19352008) 210,
Czigny, Magda (b. 1935) 212, 214, 219,
527
Czbel, Erno (18851953) 60, 72, 597, 600
Czuchnowski, Marian (19091991) 29, 599
Cosic, Bora (b. 1932) 497
Daneliuc, Mircea (b. 1943) 296
Danes, Martin (b. 1962) 264265,
Danyi, Magdolna (b. 1950) 238
Darowski, Jan (b. 1926) 82
Darvas, Jzsef (19121974) 217, 228, 233
Dabrowska, Maria (18991965) 200
Dedijer, Vladimir (19141990) 16
Dedinszky, Erika (b. 1942) 239
Dejmek, Kazimierz (19242002) 223
Delavrancea, Cella (18871991) 292
Dembinsky, Henryk (17911864) 47
Demirovic, Hamdija (b. 1953) 512, 604
Dry, Tibor (18941977) 38, 113, 115, 119,
121, 204, 213, 218, 220, 288, 301, 597,
598
-Dilas, Milovan (19111995) 16, 18, 39,
161, 179, 183
Dilong, Rudolf (19051986) 32, 94, 95,
600
Dimov, Leonid (19261987) 358
Dinescu, Mircea (b. 1950) 240, 343, 363
Divis, Ivan (19241999) 83, 602
Domahidy, Andrs (b. 1920) 213, 527, 532,
536
Domahidy, Mikls (b. 1922) 213
Dor, Milo (19232005) 52, 599
Dornsky, Jn (19111973) 600
Dormndi, Lszl (18981967) 526
Drakulic, Slavenka (b. 1949) 44, 86, 452,
467, 497, 604
Dubcek, Alexander (19211992) 250, 251,
257, 274
Ducic, Jovan (18711943) 30, 599
Dudintsev, Vladimir D. (19181998) 256
Dukovski, Dejan (b. 1969) 508
Dumitrescu-Zapada, Constantin (1912?)
287, 301
616
Dumitriu, Petru (19242002) 39, 224, 358,

602
Dyk, Viktor (18771931) 23
Dzadzic, Petar (19291996) 316, 324
Eliade, Christinel (?-1998) 292
Eliade, Mircea (19071986) 3, 3031, 75,
80, 8990, 99, 280, 290, 292, 300, 302,
457, 464
Enczi, Endre (19021974) 20809, 223,
Ersi, Istvn (19312005) 19, 38, 101, 142,
234
Erdly, Mikls (19281986) 234, 237,
526
Erdlyi, Jzsef (18961978) 206
Esterhzy, Pter (b. 1950) 219, 532
Fbry, Zoltn (18971970) 63
Faludy, Gyrgy [George] (19102006) 30,
3738, 74, 80, 83, 91, 99, 207209, 211,
213, 225, 228, 370, 493, 527, 529,
53334, 536, 598, 600601
Fangrat, Tadeusz (19121993) 28,
599600
Fehmiu, Uliks (b. 1958) 510
Fja, Gza (19001978) 63, 206, 21516
Fejto, Ferenc (b. 19092008) 18, 30,
3637, 7475, 79, 99, 160, 183, 208,
21113, 220, 22325, 227, 232, 241, 524,
531, 598
Fenyo, Miksa (18771972) 38, 87, 205,
212, 21516, 601
Fenyvessy, Jeromos (19151970) 231
Ferdinandy, Gyrgy (b. 1935) 96, 211, 219,
529, 532, 533, 537, 601
Fiala, Ferenc (19061988) 232
Filip, Ota (b. 1930) 40, 83, 100, 594, 603
Fink, Ida (b. 1921) 97, 602
Fischer, Tibor (b. 1959) 376, 382, 533
Fischer-Fy, Andor (18941974) 545
Fischl, Viktor [Avigdor Dagan]
(19122006) 27, 36, 97, 599601
Fleischman, Ivo (19211997) 267
Florczak, Zbigniew (19232005) 156, 177,
183
Florin, Theo (19081973) 27, 36, 81, 599
Fodor, Andrs (19291997) 238
Fogarasi, Bla (18911959) 24, 51, 56
Fldes, Joln [Yolanda Clarent]

(19021963) 534
Frajlich, Anna (b. 1942) 602
Fric, Josef Vclav (18291890) 23
Fuchsov, Jirina (b. 1943) 39, 307, 602
Fundoianu, Benjamin [Fondane Barbu]
(18981944) 9, 27, 77, 597
Furlan, Mira (b. 1955) 506, 516, 520
Gbor, Andor (18841953) 35, 5154,
5657, 6166, 69, 99, 129, 131, 135, 597,
600
Galgczy, Erzsbet (19301989) 233, 241
Gara, Lszl (19041966) 79, 99, 208, 212,
229
Garai, Kroly (?-1942) 66, 72
Garewicz, Jan (19212002) 403404
Gspr, Endre (18971955) 115
Gaspar, Tido Jozef (18931972) 94, 600
Georgescu Adriana (b. 1920) 285, 290,
301
Georgescu, Vlad (19371988) 83, 293,
298
Geraldini, Koloman, K. (19081994) 94,
600
Gergely, Jnos (19242008) 212, 22627
Gergely, Sndor (18961966) 63, 598,
600
Gergely, Tibor (19001978) 114
Gheorghiu, Mihai Dinu (b. 1953) 343, 363,
365, 366, 583
Gheorghiu, Virgil Constantin
(19161992) 38, 76, 79, 99, 224, 285,
301, 600
Ghica, Ion (18161897) 22
Giedroyc, Henryk (b. 1922) 149
Giedroyc, Jerzy (19062000) 34, 80,
14487, 265, 328, 336, 600
Giurchescu, Lucian (b. 1963) 499
Goetel, Ferdynand (18901960) 31
Goldmann, Lucien (19131970) 140, 227,
Golovko, Goran (b. 1965) 506
Goma, Paul (b. 1935) 5, 7, 4243, 22425,
28385, 289, 293, 29598, 308, 34249,
35153, 356, 35867, 590, 603
Gmbs, Gyula (18861936) 215
Gombos, Gyula (19132000) 21315, 229,
231
Gombrowicz, Witold (19041969) 12, 16,

21, 28, 79, 9495, 99, 150, 168, 17073,
175, 181, 183, 197, 202, 223, 227, 307,
32541, 39899, 404, 408, 410, 41213,
42331, 482, 592, 599
Gmri, Gyrgy (b. 1934) 208, 210, 213,
217, 22223, 532, 536
Gomulka, Wadisaw (19051982) 39
Gorczynska, Renata [Ewa Czarnecka] (b.
1943) 169, 173, 18384, 202
Gosztonyi, Pter (19311999) 212
Grska, Halina (18981942) 29
Grabowski, Zbigniew (19031974) 331
Greimas, Algirdas Julien (19171992) 226
Gretkowska, Manuela (b. 1964) 172
Grocholski, Zygmunt (?-1989) 332
Grotowski, Jerzy (19331999) 223, 49899
Grusa, Jir (b. 1938) 7, 12, 40, 99, 100, 398,
594, 603
Grydzewski, Mieczysaw (18941970) 27,
82, 191
Grynberg, Henryk (b. 1936) 91, 99, 170,
223, 404, 41415, 449, 467, 602
Haiducu, Matei Pavel (19482003) 43, 346
Hajnczy, Pter (19421981) 225
Halas, Frantisek (19011949) 242
Halsz, Pter (b. 1922) 88, 99, 211, 225,
229, 601
Halsz, Pter (19432006) 88, 498, 603
Hamvas, Bla (18971968) 233, 371
Hamvassy [Balzs], Anna (1875?-1958?)
24, 49
Hank, Tibor (b. 1929) 212, 22627
Haraszti, Mikls (b. 1945) 34647, 366
Haraszty, Istvn (b. 1934) 234
Hasek, Jaroslav (18831923) 58, 388
Hatr, Gyozo (19142006) 38, 83, 210,
217, 219, 221, 225, 237, 238, 524, 529,
53132, 536, 601
Hatvany, Bertalan (19001980) 30, 232,
241, 598
Hatvany, Lajos (18801961) 37, 597, 598,
600
Haulica, Dan (b. 1932) 294
Hauner, Milan (b. 1940) 260
Haupt, Zygmunt (19071975) 27, 17071,
192, 194, 202, 599
617
Hauser, Arnold (18921978) 24

Havas, Emil (18931957) 54345, 473
Havas, Endre (19091953) 30, 3637, 598,
601
Havel, Vclav (b. 1936) 93, 102, 246, 256,
257, 25961, 342
Havlcek Borovsky, Karel (18211856) 23,
99, 264
Hy, Gyula [Julius] (19001975) 26, 35, 38,
54, 5657, 6163, 66, 6872, 99, 124,
126, 129, 133, 141, 142, 211, 397, 399,
431, 598, 600, 602
Heliade Radulescu, Ion (18021871) 22,
99
Heller, gnes (b. 1929) 88
Heller, Micha [Adam Kruczek]
(19221997) 173
Hemon, Aleksandar (b. 1964) 604
Herbert, Zbigniew (19241998) 176, 223
Herling-Grudzinski, Gustaw (19192000)
29, 31, 34, 86, 99, 14546, 14951,
16465, 167, 16974, 181, 18384, 397,
42231, 599
Hertz, Aleksander (18951983) 167, 184
Hertz, Zofia (19112003) 145, 149, 182
Hertz, Zygmunt (19081979) 145, 149,
174, 184
Hevesi, Andrs (?-?) 74
Hevesy, Ivn (18931966) 119, 122
Heydenkorn, Benedykt (19061999) 150
Hidas, Antal (18991980) 60, 597, 598,
602
Hasko, Marek (19341969) 39, 97, 170,
172, 17576, 184, 592, 602
Hoffman, Eva (b. 1945) 15, 100, 398, 405,
415, 437, 44044, 44647, 44953,
45556, 459, 462, 466, 46769, 492, 584,
59394
Holban, Anton (19021937) 279
Holland, Agnieszka (b. 1948) 180, 184
Hora, Josef (18911945) 390, 393
Hork, Jir (19242003) 246, 253, 274
Horia, Vintila (19151992) 5, 3132, 44,
79, 85, 94, 100, 224, 289, 571, 600
Horthy, Mikls (18681957) 30, 93, 110,
213, 215, 230
Horvth Elemr (b. 1933) 529
Horvth, Bla (19271981) 206208
618
Horvth, dn von (19011938) 54, 313

Hossu-Longin, Lucia (b. 1951) 363
Hostovsky, Egon (19081973) 27, 36, 87,
256, 388, 599601
Hrabal, Bohumil (19141997) 256
Hus, Jan (13691415) 5657
Ibraileanu, Garabet (18711936) 279
Ierunca, Virgil (19202006) 38, 75, 80, 84,
27677, 280, 282, 285, 287, 289, 29192,
29697, 299, 366, 601
Ignotus [Hugo Veigelsberg] (18691949)
37, 597, 598, 601
Ignotus, Pl (19011978) 30, 37, 38,
8183, 100, 206209, 21115, 229, 233,
598
Ihnatowicz, Janusz A. (b. 1929) 82
Iliesu, Petru (b. 1951) 343
Ills, Bla (18951974) 35, 57, 6062, 66,
100, 597, 600
Illys, Elemr (19191989) 225
Illys, Gyula (19021983) 63, 204, 218,
521, 532
Iakowiczwna, Kazimiera (18921983)
28, 307, 599600
Indries, Alexandra (19361993) 357
Ioanid, Ion (b. 1926) 39, 100, 363, 602
Ionesco, Eugne [Eugen Ionescu]
(19091994) 9, 73, 75, 79, 100, 224, 280,
284, 29293, 298, 300, 302, 399, 598
Ionesco, Marie France (b. 1944) 293, 295,
29899
Ionescu, Nae (**) 458
Iorga, Nicolae (18711940) 279
Iorgulescu, Mircea (b. 1943) 360, 603
Isou, Isidore (19252007) 7879, 100,
600601
Istrati, Panat (18841935) 59, 224
Iulian, Rodica (b. 1931) 293
Iwaniuk, Wacaw (19122001) 91, 93, 170,
600601
Iwaszkiewicz, Jarosaw (18941980)
32728
Jancs, Mikls (b. 1921) 239
Jankovich, Imre (b. 1949) 218
Janta-Poczynski, Aleksander
(19081974) 157, 184
Jaruzelski, Vojczieh Witold (b. 1923) 39,

42, 16465, 498
Jasienski, Bruno (19021939) 10, 27,
5960, 100, 124, 126, 142, 597
Jastrun, Tomasz (b. 1950) 177
Jszi, Oszkr (18751957) 2425, 51,
5354, 110, 115, 205206
Jela, Doina (b. 1951) 281, 301, 364, 366
Jelenski, Konstanty Aleksander
(19221987) 79, 100, 146, 14951, 159,
17073, 177, 18081, 18384, 222, 298,
337, 599
Jezdinsky, Karel (19391998) 25051, 268,
27274
Jirous, Ivan (b. 1944) 257
Jons, Josef (19202002) 246, 253
Jovanovic, Dusan (b. 1939) 515, 517
Jsika, Mikls (17941865) 23
Jzsef, Attila (19051937) 30, 232, 526
Juhsz, Ferenc (b. 1928) 225, 238
Juhsz, Vilmos (18991967) 215
Jungmann, Milan (b. 1922) 255, 26164
Kabdeb, Tams (b. 1934) 211
Kdr, Jnos (19121989) 35, 133, 137,
142, 204, 207, 213, 217, 224, 233234,
237, 347, 373374, 377378, 521, 524,
527
Kadirova, Ruis (b. ?) 502
Kafka, Franz (18831924) 41, 96, 131,
220, 256, 369, 377, 380381, 417, 457,
460, 463
Kllai, Erno [Ernst] (18901954) 55,
118120, 122
Kaltenberg, Lew (19101989) 28, 599, 600
Kanns, Alajos (b. 1926) 231
Karadzic, Vuk Stefanovic (17871864) 47
Karahasan, Dzevad (b. 1953) 509, 520
Kartson, Endre (b. 1933) 75, 100, 208,
211, 213, 236237, 239, 241, 524525,
529, 532, 536, 607
Kariks, Frigyes (18911938) 58, 72, 597
Karinthy, Ferenc (19211992) 218
Krnet, Jir (b. 1920) 246
Krolyi, Mihly (18751955) 25, 3637,
54, 75, 109, 555, 597
Karpinski, Jakub (19402003) 162163,
177, 184
Karpinski, Wojciech (b. 1943) 172, 183

Karski, Jan (19142000) 191
Kassai, Gyrgy (b. 1922) 226
Kassk, Lajos (18871967) 2325, 5354,
60, 71, 76, 100, 109111, 113120, 122,
218, 526, 597, 598
Katkov, Mikhail (18181887) 243
Kavan, Jan (b. 1946) 267
Kemenes-Gfin, Lszl (b. 1937) 210, 529,
530, 532, 536
Kemny, Alfrd (18951945) 57, 118
Kemny, Tomaso (b. 1940) 533
Kende, Pter (b. 1927) 144, 223, 225
Kenessey, Mikls (b. 1933) 239
Kerecsendi Kiss, Mrton (19171990) 95
Kernyi, Karl (18971973) 206, 237, 524
Kri, Pl (18821961) 540
Kertsz, Imre (b. 1929) 18, 51, 100, 216,
219, 308, 368383, 397, 590
Kthly, Anna (18891976) 211212, 307
Kibdi Varga, ron (b. 1930) 76, 85, 211,
225, 230, 241, 525, 527, 529, 532, 536,
607
Kijowski, Andrzej (19281985) 414
Kirly, Istvn (19211989) 529
Kirsch, Roland (19601989) 485
Kis, Danilo (19351989) 43, 313, 585
Kis, Jnos (b. 1943) 260, 371
Kisielewski, Stefan (19111991) 163, 177
Kodly, Zoltn (18821967) 35, 100, 227
Koestler, Arthur (19051983) 26, 30, 96,
100, 151, 158159, 179, 204, 206, 212,
397, 399, 523, 597, 599
Kogalniceanu, Mihail (18171891) 22,
362, 362
Kohout, Pavel (b. 1928) 7, 40, 55, 345, 498,
603
Kokotovic, Nada (b. 1944) 506, 510
Kolakowski, Leszek (b. 1927) 7, 41, 100,
163, 184, 223, 324, 602
Kolr, Jan (19231978) 246, 253, 256
Kollr, Jan (17931852) 47
Komjt, Aladr (18911937) 25, 115, 597
Konrd, Gyrgy (b. 1933) 7, 19, 210, 218,
225, 342, 366, 371, 373, 383, 452, 580,
595
Konwicki, Tadeusz (b.1926) 223
Kopecky, Vclav (18971961) 244
619
Korda, Alexander (18931956) 48, 51, 55,

115, 597
Krmendi, Ferenc (19001972) 88, 534
Korniss, Dezso (19081984) 110
Kosinski, Jerzy (19331991) 88, 602
Koskov, Helena (b. 1935) 257
Kossuth, Lajos (18021892) 47, 81, 117,
554
Kosztolnyi, dm (19151980) 215
Kosztolnyi, Dezso (18851936) 215
Kosciuszko, Tadeusz (17461817) 145,
191
Kott, Jan (19142001) 7, 41, 88, 100, 340,
415, 602
Kovac, Mirko (b. 1938) 604
Kovacevic, Dusan (b. 1948) 514515
Kovcs, Imre (19131980) 93, 205, 207,
208, 215, 220, 232233, 521, 536
Kovlyov, Heda (b. 1919) 251
Kovtun, Jir (b. 1927) 245248, 251, 253,
256257, 274
Kowalewski, Janusz (19101996) 331
Kowalik, Jan (19102001) 144, 185,
192193, 195, 196, 202
Krl, Petr (b. 1944) 263, 264
Krasinski, Zygmunt (18121859) 21, 325
Krass, Mikls (19301986) 208, 213
Krejca, Otomar (b. 1921) 498
Kridl, Manfred (18821957) 190
Kristeva, Julia (b. 1941) 226, 442, 466, 468
Kristof, Agota (b. 1935) 12, 38, 79, 86, 100,
210, 212, 307, 524, 589, 595, 601
Krleza, Miroslav (18931981) 59, 100,
137, 313, 514
Krdy, Gyula (18781933) 219, 239
Kruzliak, Imrich (b. 1914) 38, 83, 601
Kulcsr Szab, Erno (b. 1950) 373, 383,
532, 534, 536
Kun, Bla (18861938) 25, 48, 53, 5862,
6566, 71, 72, 100101, 113, 122, 133,
143
Kuncewiczowa, Maria (18991989) 307,
332, 440
Kundera, Milan (b. 1929) 307, 332, 440
Kunes, Ilja (b. 1956) 265
Kuron, Jacek (b. 1934) 161, 342
Kusturica, Emir (b. 1954) 504505, 507
Kutasi, Elemr (?-?) 112
620
Kwasniewski, Aleksander (b. 1954) 181,

618
Lakatos, Imre (19221974) 228
Landler, Jeno (18751928) 53, 72, 115
Langer, Frantisek (18881965) 27, 8182,
599600
Lnyi, Sarolta (18911975) 60, 72, 307,
597, 600
Larian, Sonia (b. 1931) 294
Lazin, Milos (b. 1952) 510, 514516,
519520
Lechon, Jan [Leszek Serafinowicz]
(18991956) 27, 87, 95, 190191, 331,
599
Lehotzky, Gergely (19301979) 226
Lengyel, Balzs (b. 19182007) 235, 535
Lengyel, Jzsef (18961975) 2526, 35,
62, 69, 72, 100101, 597, 601
Lengyel, Menyhrt (18801974) 540
Lerski Jerzy (19171992) 191
Leszcza, Jan (19181992) 192193, 195,
202
Lesznai, Anna (18851966) 24, 5152, 54,
114, 307, 597, 598
Lvay, Jzsef (18251918) 235, 241
Liehm, Antonin (b. 1924) 298
Liiceanu, Gabriel (b. 1942) 299
Linhartov, Vera (b. 1938) 40, 307, 389,
602
Lipski, Leo (19171997) 29, 96, 101, 170,
175, 185, 599
Lovinescu, Eugen (18811943) 279281,
301302
Lovinescu, Horia (19171983) 279
Lovinescu, Monica [Saint Come, Monique;
Pascal, Claude] (19232008) 5, 38,
4243, 75, 80, 84, 99, 107, 276302, 307,
351, 366, 397, 583, 601
Lovinescu, Vasile (19051984) 279
Lovric, Ivan (17541777) 315
Luca, Gherasim [Salman Locker]
(19131994) 38, 7779, 9798,
101102, 581, 601
Lukcs, Gyrgy [Georg] (18851971) 6,
2426, 35, 4849, 5154, 5657, 60,
6266, 69, 72, 99101, 109115,
121143, 212, 227, 418, 584, 597, 600
Lupascu, Stefan (19001988) 280, 290,

292, 300, 302
Lustig, Arnost (b. 1926) 89, 97, 602
Luza, Radomr (b. 1922) 274
awrynowicz, Zygmunt (19251987) 82
obodowski, Jzef (19091988) 27, 86,
599
ysek, Pawe (19141978) 88, 192, 194,
202
Mackiewicz Jzef (19021985) 3, 3334,
98, 101, 160, 164, 167, 170172, 185,
331332, 423424, 429
Mackiewicz, Stanisaw (18961966)
177178
Mcza, Jnos (18931974) 35, 53,
115116, 122, 597
Madej, Bogdan (19342002) 170, 172
Mailat, Maria (b. 1953) 294
Makkai, dm (b. 1935) 215, 226, 531,
536
Makkai, Sndor (18901951) 15
Manchevski, Milcho (b. 1959) 506
Manea, Norman (b. 1936) 15, 42, 88, 101,
360, 434, 437, 440, 449, 456468, 603
Mannheim, Karl (18931947) 24, 48, 52,
54, 192, 338
Manolescu, Nicolae (b. 1939) 283, 290,
302, 360361, 367, 595
Mrai, Sndor (19001989) 12, 16, 26, 35,
38, 44, 84, 8687, 9293, 101, 139, 205,
212, 229232, 370, 381383, 398399,
402, 405, 415, 416431, 488, 492, 524,
527, 529530, 532, 534537, 569, 581,
601
Marganski, Janusz (b. 1962) 337, 341
Marinat, Alexei (b. 1924) 346
Markov, Georgi (19291978) 348, 501,
514, 520
Markovic, Milena (b. 1974) 514, 520
Markowski, Micha Pawe (b. 1962) 335,
341
Marschalk, Lajos (19031968) 600
Martnek, Lubomr (b. 1954) 254
Mrton, Lszl (b. 1934) 208, 213234,
236, 522523, 537
Mrton, Lszl (b. 1959) 522
Maruna, Boris (19402007) 602603
Masaryk, Toms Garrigue (18501937)

248, 254, 258
Materic, Mladen (b. 1953) 503505, 507
Mattis-Teutsch, Jnos (18841960) 114
Mazilescu, Virgil (19421984) 358
Meciar, Stanislav (19101971) 32, 94, 600
Megyeri, Sri (18971984) 540
Mehmedinovic, Semezdin (b. 1961) 44,
604
Melinescu, Gabriela (b. 1942) 86, 603
Mray, Tibor (b. 1924) 38, 80, 208210,
217, 223, 228, 229, 531, 602
Mro, Ferenc (b. 1916) 231, 241
Mszly, Mikls (19212001) 218, 238,
526
Michnik, Adam (b. 1946) 162, 223, 342
Mickiewicz, Adam (17981855) 21, 22, 58,
150, 184, 198, 223, 325, 330, 412, 581
Mieroszewski, Juliusz (19061976) 149,
154155, 159162, 166167, 173175,
178, 183, 185187
Mihajlov, Mihajlo (b. 1934) 179
Mikes, Gyrgy (19121987) 81, 97,
211212, 225, 229, 235, 524, 540
Mikes, Kelemen (16901761) 12, 101,
235
Mikoajczyk, Stanisaw (19011966) 200
Milosevic, Slobodan (19412006) 501,
504, 509, 516
Miosz, Czesaw (19112004) 21, 27, 29,
34, 37, 44, 79, 82, 89, 100, 102103, 150,
168, 170176, 181, 183184, 186187,
190, 198, 222, 260, 312, 317, 324, 332,
431, 475, 588, 601, 604
Mindszenty, Cardinal Jzsef (18921975)
37, 75, 93, 540
anina (b. 1967) 514
Mircevska, Z
Miron, Paul (19262008) 32, 48, 287
Mlynrik, Jan (b. 1933) 258259
Mnacko, Ladislav (19191994) 97, 223,
229, 602, 603
Modrzejewska, Helena [Modjeska]
(18401909) 192
Modzelewski, Karol (b. 1937) 161
Moholy-Nagy, Lszl (18951946) 53, 55,
57, 110, 115, 118120, 122, 597, 606
Molnr, Ferenc (18781952) 30, 87, 238,
598
621
Molnr, Jzsef (b. 1918) 84, 205206, 215,

229
Morawski, Dominik (b. 1921) 167
Mostwin, Danuta (b. 1921) 189, 191194,
196203, 307
Mricz, Zsigmond (18791942) 63, 206
Mrozek, Sawomir (b. 1930) 39, 44, 170,
172, 176, 223, 399, 602, 604
Mucha, Jir (19151991) 27, 36, 43,
599600, 604
Mller, Herta (b. 1953) 12, 15, 43, 307, 397,
475481, 483496, 510, 593, 603
Mugur, Vlad (19272001) 457, 499
Murti, Lili (19142003) 85
Ndas, Pter (b. 1942) 219, 532
Nagy, Imre (18961958) 36, 38, 63, 14,
210, 213, 233, 234
Nagy, Lszl (19251978) 225, 238
Nagy, Pl (b. 1934) 76, 219, 234, 236, 238,
525
Nagy Pter (b. 1920) 527
Najder, Zdzisaw (b. 1930) 163, 177, 186,
514515, 520
Naschitz, Frigyes (19001989) 224
Nedelcovici, Bujor (b. 1936) 289, 293295,
297, 302, 360, 603
Negoitescu, Ion (19211993) 342, 345,
347, 603
Nejedly, Zdenek (18781962) 27, 35,
599600
Nemec, Jir (19322001) 257
Nemes-Lamprth, Jzsef (18911924)
114115
Nmeth, Andor (18911953) 30, 37, 54,
115, 122, 597598, 600
Nmeth, Lszl (19011975) 206, 213,
215218, 234, 241, 532
Nmeth, Sndor (19311993) 239
Neumann, Jnos (John) (19021957) 228
Nezval, Vtezslav (19001958) 256
Nivat, Georges (b. 1935) 260
Noica, Constantin (19091987) 289
Norwid, Cyprian Kamil (18211883) 21,
81, 325, 581
Novotny, Antonn (19041975) 223, 250
Nowak-Jezioranski, Jan (19132005) 191
Nowakowski, Marek (b. 1935) 172, 177
622
Nowakowski, Tadeusz (19171996) 31

Nusic, Branislav (18641938) 514, 515
Nyro, Jzsef (18891953) 33, 44, 85, 102,
212, 230231, 448, 529, 534, 600
Obersovszky, Gyula (b. 19272001) 38
Odojewski, Wodzimierz (b. 1930) 15, 83,
172, 602
Ok, Jn (19151990) 32, 94, 600
Olh, Gyrgy (19021981) 95
Orascu, Serban (b. 1925) 283
Oravecz, Imre (b. 1943) 532
rkny, Istvn (19121979) 218
Orlea, Oana (b. 1936) 293
Oros, Kazimierz (b. 1935) 170, 172, 177
Ornest, Ota (19132002) 272
Orzeszkowa, Eliza (18411910) 200
Osadczuk, Bohdan (b. 1920) 150, 184
Osman, Nedjo (b. 1958) 502, 506, 510
Ostojic, Tanja (b. 1972) 512
Osvt, Erno (18761929) 113
Ottlik, Gza (19121990) 217, 218
Ovechkin, Valentin (19041968) 256
Pacepa, Ion Mihai (b. 1928) 276, 285,
345346, 367
Paderewski, Ignacy Jan (18601941)
199200
Pger, Antal (18991986) 95, 230
Plczi-Horvth, Gyrgy [George]
(19081973) 3738, 8283, 206208,
211, 599601
Pandur, Tomaz (b. 1963) 505, 516
Pankowski, Marian (b. 1919) 31, 82,
170171, 175, 186
Papnek, Jn (18961991) 265
Papilian, Alexandru (b. 1947) 289, 302
Papp, Tibor (b. 1936) 76, 234, 236237,
240241, 525
Paraschiv, Vasile (b. 1928) 296, 345, 364,
367
Parnicki, Teodor (19081988) 29, 9596,
175, 186, 602
Paruit, Alain (b. 1939) 295, 365, 366
Pasek, Jan Chryzostom (16361701) 330
Pasovic, Haris (b. 1962) 507
Ptkai, Ervin (19371985) 236
Patocka, Jan (19071977) 224
Paunescu, Adrian (b. 1943) 290

Pejovic, Katarina (b. 1962) 517
Pelevic, Maja (b. 1981) 514
Pelikn, Jir (19231999) 117, 251
Penciulescu, Radu (b. 1930) 499
Penescu, Nicolae (18961981) 283
Pri, Lszl (18991967) 55, 110
Perneczky, Gza (b. 1936) 239
Peroutka, Ferdinand (18951978) 36, 83,
88, 245, 253, 269, 601
Petrescu, Camil (18941957) 284
Petrescu, Dan (b. 1949) 289, 294, 296, 343
Petrovici, Dusan (b. 1938) 360
Petrovic, Rastko (18981949) 30, 599
Philippide, Alexandru (19001979) 288
Pietrkiewicz, Jerzy (19162007) 12, 27,
8182, 599
Pijade, Mosa (18901957) 309310
Pilt, Oldrich (19261988) 271, 274
Pilinszky, Jnos (19211981) 233, 238
Pisudski, Jzef (18671935) 149, 187, 200
Pintilie, Lucian (b. 1933) 294, 296, 499
Pistorius, George (b. 1922) 389
Pithart, Petr (b. 1941) 257, 267
Pitu, Luca (b. 1947) 294, 343, 357, 360, 367
Polnyi, Karl [Kroly] (18861964) 2425,
54, 524, 228
Polnyi, Michael [Mihly] (18911976) 24,
205, 214, 228
Pomian, Krzysztof (b. 1934) 144, 150,
154155, 163, 164, 167, 173, 180, 181,
183, 186187
Pomian, Grazyna (b. 1934) 168, 178, 180,
186
Popescu, D[umitru] R[adu] (b. 1935) 287
Popescu, Petru (b. 1944) 42, 603
Popescu, Simona (b. 1965) 485
Popescu, Traian (19102003) 32, 85, 601
Popovic, Aleksandar (19291996) 515
Popper, Jacob (19211996) 285
Porok, Leszek (19191984) 223
Pospieszalski, Antoni (19122008) 167,
186
Povolny, Mojmr (b. 1921) 246
Prgay, Dezso (b. 1921) 237
Prica, Srd-an (?-?) 310
Pruszynski, Ksawery (19071950) 325,
341
Przybyszewski, Stanisaw (18681927) 24

Pski, Sndor (b. 1911) 231, 528
Puaski, Kazimierz (17481779) 191
Pulszky, Ferenc (18141897) 47, 81
Purkyne, Jan Evangelista (17871869) 41
Putrament, Jerzy (19101986) 28, 599
Radvnyi, Lszl [Johann Schmidt]
(19001978) 51, 56
Raicu, Lucian (19342006) 294, 603
Rainis, Janis (18651929) 24
Rkosi, Mtys (18921971) 72, 133, 137,
140, 217, 233, 235, 238, 540
Rkczy II, Ferenc (16761735) 12, 235
Ransdorf, Emil (19201974) 246, 253
Ratiu, Ion (19172000) 225
Rembek, Stanisaw (19011985) 175, 186
Resic, Haris (b. 1964) 504
Rvai, Jzsef (18981959) 25, 35, 51, 54,
63, 115, 597, 599
Rewska, Hanna Szarzynska- (b. 1916)
178
Ripka, Hubert (18951953?) 244
Ristic, Ljubisa (b. 1947) 501, 506
Rosetti, C[onstantin] A. (18161885) 22
Rudnicki, Adolf (19121990) 28, 404, 413,
598, 600
Rudnicki, Janusz (b. 1956) 172
Russo, Alecu (18191859) 22, 102
Rssovich, Alejandro (b. 1925) 327
Rymkiewicz, Aleksander (19131983) 15,
Rymkiewicz, Jarosaw Marek (b. 1935)
167, 186
Sabata, Jaroslav (b. 1927) 384
Sajko, Ivana (b. 1975) 514
Sajtinac, Ugljesa (b. 1972) 514, 520
Salivarov, Zdena (b. 1993) 40, 9293, 102,
307, 602
Sandauer, Artur (19131989) 336, 338, 341
Sararu, Dinu (b. 1932) 287
Srkzi, Mrta (19071966) 238
Srkzi, Mtys [Fekete Mrton] (b. 1937)
83, 211, 238, 529
Schadl, Jnos (18921944) 114
Schaff, Adam (b. 1913) 223
Schlesak, Dieter (b. 1934) 360
Schpflin, Aladr (18721950) 547, 574
623
Schpflin, Gyrgy [George] (b. 1939) 37,

100, 102, 215, 601
Schulz, Bruno (18921942) 403, 425
Schwarz-Cervinka, Josef (19152003) 244
Sebeok, Thomas (19202001) 226, 227
Sebok, Istvn (19011942) 110
Seflov, Ludmila (b. 1928) 255
Seicaru, Pamfil (18941980) 32, 85, 599
Seifert, Jaroslav (19011986) 256, 434
Sever, Alexandru (b. 1921) 603
Siklov, Jirina (b. 1935) 267
Simecka, Milan (19301990) 260
Simion, Eugen (b. 1933) 361
Simko, Dusan (b. 1945) 86, 602
Simon, Andor (19011986) 115
Simon, Joln (18851938) 116
Simovic, Ljubomir (b. 1936) 515
Sink, Ervin (18981967) 2526, 48,
5153, 57, 61, 6773, 79, 102103, 115,
124, 126, 131, 137, 141, 143, 397, 597
Sipos, Gyula [Albert Pl] (b. 1935) 211, 226
Sito, Jerzy Stanisaw (b. 1934) 39, 82, 601,
602
Skalmowski, Wojciech (b. 1933) 169, 173,
186
Skvorecky, Josef (b. 1924) 4, 23, 40, 9193,
103, 263264, 267, 274, 384, 387, 389,
399, 581, 602
Sonimski, Antoni (18951976) 27, 36, 59,
8182, 103, 404, 599, 601
Sowacki, Juliusz (18091849) 21, 198,
325, 330
Smolar, Aleksandar (b. 1940) 298
Snajder, Slobodan (b. 1948) 514515, 520
Sokolovic, Zijah (b. 1950) 516
Solomon, Alexandru (b. 1966) 300, 303
Sorescu, Marin (19361996) 289, 360
Soros, George (b. 1930) 159, 511, 610
Souckov, Milada (18981983) 36, 89, 307,
393, 601
Sova, Antonn (18641928) 390, 393
Sovagovic, Filip (b. 1966) 507
Sperber, Mans (19051984) 159, 293
Spir, Gyrgy (b. 1946) 373, 383
Sprinc, Mikuls (19141986) 32, 94
Srbljanovic, Biljana (b. 1970) 507, 515, 520
Stamatu, Horia (19121989) 3132, 85,
599
624
Stande, Stansaw Ryszard (18971939) 27,

5960, 98, 598
Stanisic, Vesna (b. 1961) 510
Stawar, Andrzej (19001961) 28, 39,
175176, 599600, 602
Stefanovski, Goran (b. 1952) 501,
507508, 513, 515, 520
Steinhardt, Nicu (19121989) 363, 457
Stelaru, Dimitrie (19171971) 289
Stempowski, Jerzy [Pawe Hostowiec]
(18941969) 27, 8283, 86, 150, 152,
156157, 160, 168, 170174, 181, 183,
186187, 409, 415
Stern, Anatol (18991968) 2829, 598
Stevanovic, Vidosav (b. 1942) 514
Stiks, Igor (b. 1977) 604
Stolojan, Sanda (b. 1919) 295, 298
Straszewicz, Czesaw (19041963) 28, 95,
168, 170, 331
Streinu, Vladimir (19021970) 291
Strmen, Karol (19211994) 94, 600
Strug, Andrzej (18711937) 169, 174
Sturc, Ludovt (19031976) 265
Suchanow, Klementyna (Czernicka
Klementyna) (b. 1974) 326, 341
Sulyok, Vince (b. 1932) 210
Sukowski, Tadeusz (19071960) 82
Surnyi, Mikls (18821936) 230
Sutnar, Ladislav (18971976) 254
Svestka, Oldrich (19221983) 251
Svitk, Ivan (19251994) 223, 287
Swinarski, Artur Marya (19001965) 408
Szabolcsi, Mikls (19212000) 100, 239
Szab, Dezso (18791945) 206, 213216,
220, 229, 230
Szab, Lszl Cs. (19051984) 38, 82, 205,
207208, 211, 214, 230, 232, 237239,
521522, 524525, 527, 529, 601
Szab, Lorinc (19001957) 116, 117, 122
Szab, Magda (19172007) 218
Szab, Zoltn (19121984) 37, 82,
205209, 211, 230, 232233, 237238,
241, 529, 601
Zas [Szsz], Lrnt (b. 19101999) 568
Szczepanski, Maciej (b. 1928) 180, 187
Szekfu, Gyula (18831955) 215
Szelecky, Zita (19151999) 95
Szelnyi, Ivn (b. 1938) 218, 371
Szeli, Istvn (b. 1921) 238

Szentgyrgyi, Albert (18931986) 228
Szentkuthy, Mikls (19081988) 234, 241,
526
Szenwald, Lucjan (19091944)
Szilrd, Le (18981964) 228
Szondi, Pter (19291971) 227
Szubska, Barbara (?-?) 331
Szymborska, Wisawa (b. 1923) 223
Smieja, Florian (b. 1925) 82, 93
Tbori, Gyrgy [George] (19142007) 47,
598
Tbori, Pl (19081974) 540, 582, 587,
595, 598
Taborski, Bolesaw (b. 1927) 82
Tams, Aladr (18991997) 119, 122
Tams, Gspr Mikls (b. 1948) 535
Tamsi, ron (18971966) 15, 86, 212,
235, 560
Tanase, Virgil (b. 1945) 4243, 282, 284,
289, 295, 303, 603
Tardos, Tibor (19182004) 30, 3738, 225,
598, 600, 602
Tarnawski, Wit (18941988) 332
Tatarescu, Gheorghe (18861957) 281
Teige, Karel (19001951) 256
Teller, Ede [Eduard] (19082003) 228
Teodoreanu, Lili [Stefana VelisarTeodoreanu] (18971955) 292
Tepeneag, Dumitru (b. 1937) 7, 42, 80,
224225, 228, 358, 603
Terlecki, Tymon (19052000) 82, 187
Thinsz, Gza (19341990) 86, 210, 529
Thomka, Beta (b. 1949) 238
Tigrid, Pavel [Pavel Schnfeld]
(19172003) 27, 36, 43, 8083, 223,
242255, 257258, 261, 264275,
599601, 603
Tiso, Jozef (18871947) 32, 87, 94, 474
Titel, Sorin (19351985) 358
Tito [Josip Broz] (18921980) 73, 207,
138, 309, 310, 502, 516
Todic, Suncican (b. ?) 502
Todorov, Tzvetan (b. 1939) 226, 514
Tolnai, Ott (b. 1940) 238
Tomic, Milica (b. 1960) 512
Totok, William (b. 1951) 43, 485, 603
Trestkov, Helena (b. 1949) 246

Trobozic Garfield, Milena (b. 1960) 510
Tud-man, Franjo (19221999) 506, 510
Tudor, Corneliu Vadim (b. 1949) 291
Tudoran, Dorin (b. 1945) 4, 42, 284, 289,
292293, 296299, 343, 603
Turcea, Daniel (19451979) 358
Tuwim, Julian (18941953) 27, 36, 87, 95,
404, 599, 600
Tuz, Tams (19161992) 211, 231
Tyl, Josef Kajetn (18081856) 390, 393
Tyrmand, Leopold (19201985) 89,
170171, 180, 187, 602
Tzara, Tristan (18961963) 77
Udovicki, Lenka (b. 1967) 516
Ugresic, Dubravka (b. 1949) 11, 44, 85,
103, 313, 323, 497, 589590, 595596,
604
Uhde, Milan (b. 1936) 384
Uitz, Bla (18871972) 35, 60, 110,
114115, 117, 120, 597, 602
jvri, Erzsbet (18991955) 60, 307, 597
jvry, Sndor (19041988) 84
Unger, Leopold (b. 1922) 150, 173
Urban, Milo (19041982) 32, 94, 139, 140,
600, 603
Urbnek, Zdenek (b. 1913) 261
Urzidil, Johannes (18961970) 87
Uscatescu, George (19111995) 85
Vaculk, Ludvk (b. 1926) 256257, 389,
393
Vmos, Gejza (19011956) 599
Vmos, Imre (19281980) 205208, 210,
213
Vancura, Vladislav (18911942) 388389
Vrdy, Pter (b. 1935) 216
Vrdy, Steven Bla (b. 1935) 565, 570, 574
Vaszary, Jnos (18991963) 85
Vatai, Lszl (19141993) 231
Vgel, Lszl (b. 1941) 508509, 520
Velmar-Jankovic, Vladimir (18951976) 32
Vianu, Ion (b. 1934) 347
Vianu, Lidia (b. 1947) 347, 367
Vida, Viktor (19131960) 599
Vincenz, Stanisaw (18881971) 28, 82, 86,
170171, 599600
625
Visniec, Matei (b. 1956) 603

Vitz, Gyrgy (b. 1933) 529, 532
Vladislav, Jan (b. 1923) 257, 267, 275
Vnuk, Gordana (b. 1955) 510
Vogel, David (18911944) 48, 103
Volny, Slva (19281987) 267
Voronca, Ilarie (19031946) 27, 77, 598
Vrsvry, Istvn (1913?) 93, 95
Voskovec, Jir [Jir Wachsmann]
(19051981) 256
Vucurovic, Natasa (b. 1964) 514
Vujicic, Borislav (19572005) 516
Wagner, Richard (b. 1952) 5, 43, 103, 477,
485, 562, 603
Wajda, Andrzej (b. 1926) 288, 303, 499
Wasa, Lech (b. 1943) 181
Wandurski, Witold (18911937) 27, 59, 98,
598
Wankowicz, Melchior (18921974) 27, 39,
103, 183, 187, 599, 602
Wass, Albert (19081998) 5, 33, 4344, 84,
87, 93, 212, 224, 230, 397, 474, 534535,
538541, 543, 545551, 553, 555557,
559561, 563575, 583, 585, 592, 593,
599
Wat, Aleksander (19001967) 2829, 34,
70, 77, 103, 124, 126, 141143, 171,
175176, 187, 397, 423424, 428429,
431, 447, 598
Wazyk, Adam (19051982) 28, 103, 204,
222, 598, 600
Weiner, Tibor (19061965) 110
Weininger, Andor (18991986) 110
Wellek, Ren (19031995) 256
Weres, Sndor (19131989) 233235,
238, 241, 526
Werich, Jan (19051980) 256
Wierzynski, Kazimierz (18941969) 27,
87, 170, 190191, 599
Wiesel, Elie (b. 1928) 89, 103, 372, 600
Wigner, Jeno [Eugene] (19021995) 228
Wildstein, Bronisaw (b. 1952) 172
Wirpsza, Witold (19181985) 602
Wittlin, Jzef (18961976) 172, 190,
331332, 400, 404, 406, 415
Wojtya, Karol Jzef [Pope John Paul II]
(19202005) 79
626
Wraga, Ryszard [Jerzy Niezbrzycki]

(19021968) 156, 187
Wygodski, Stanisaw (19071992) 97
Wyka, Kazimierz (19101975) 192, 203
Zaciu, Mircea (19282000) 289
Zagajewski, Adam (b. 1945) 42, 44, 170,
172, 603604
Zaln, Magda (b. 1936) 225
alica, Antonije (b. 1959) 604
Z
Zmecnk, Karel [Karel Prokop] (b. 1942)
257
Zappia, Larry (b. 1965) 506

arnov, Andrej [Frantisek Subk]
Z
(19031982) 32, 94, 600601
Zathurecky, Gyula (19071987) 550, 601
eromski, Stefan (18641925) 169, 174,
Z
174
Zilahy, Lajos (18911974) 38, 54, 87,
205207, 214215, 230, 232, 524, 527,
597, 600
Zilber, Belu [Herbert] (19011978) 363
Zinoviev, Aleksandr (19222000) 28

Neubauer The Exile and Return of Writers From East-Central Europe

Încărcat de

Informații document

Titlu original

Drepturi de autor

Formate disponibile

Partajați acest document

Partajați sau inserați document

Opțiuni de partajare

Vi se pare util acest document?

Este necorespunzător acest conținut?

Drepturi de autor:

Formate disponibile

Neubauer The Exile and Return of Writers From East-Central Europe

Încărcat de

Drepturi de autor:

Formate disponibile

The Exile and Return of Writers from East-Central Europe

The Exile and Return

John Neubauer and Borbla Zsuzsanna Trk

Walter de Gruyter Berlin New York

Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines

of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Chapter II: Exile Cultures Abroad:

Kultura (19462000) (Wodzimierz Bolecki) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Polish World War II Veteran migr Writers in the US:

Irodalmi jsg in Exile: 19571989 (John Neubauer) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Hungarian Mikes Kr and Magyar Muhely:

Monica Lovinescu at Radio Free Europe (Camelia Cra ciun) . . . . . . . .

Chapter III: Individual Trajectories

Gombrowicz, the migr (Jerzy Jarze bski) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325

Kunderas Paradise Lost: Paradigm of the Circle

Chapter IV: Autobiographical Exile Writing

Exile Diaries: Sndor Mrai, Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski,

Chapter V: The 1990s:

Albert Wass: Rebirth and Apotheosis of a TransylvanianHungarian Writer (John Neubauer) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

A Timeline of Exile Movements, 19192000 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 597

attempted to include a broad scene that included personal and ideological

responded to the avalanche of questions and suggestions concerning both

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

from homelessness. Ideological commitment or its opposite, namely a desire

The criteria of irreversibility and immediate threat to a persons freedom or

Since it remains unclear in this passage by what criteria a self-exile may be

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

2. Exile and Writing

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

3. The Home Cultures

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

Each East-Central European communist regime forced its own pattern of

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

left it. Witness Ciorans Schimbarea la fata a Romniei (The Transfiguration of

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

4. The Dialectics of Exile and Homecoming

The Nineteenth-Century Exile Traditions

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

Przybyszewski started to write in Berlin, but became the leading figure of

Exodus from Hungary in 1919

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy led in October 1918 to a

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

Fleeing the Nazis: 193839

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

Escaping and Homecoming in 194445

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

The right-wing Hungarian writers settled mostly in Germany, Argentina,

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

Racing against the Dropping Iron Curtain: 194750

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

1968 and Beyond

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century (John Neubauer)

Homecoming and New Forms of Exile after 1989